There are a few different Tony Furtados. Or, at least, there have been a few distinct phases of the Portland-based singer-songwriter’s career. The first one started in the sixth grade.
“I was a weird little kid,” Furtado says. “I used to make model airplanes—anything I could make, I would make it.” And when a class assignment asked him to build an instrument, only one came into the boy’s mind: banjo.
“I was thinking, ‘OK, I’ll take a pie tin, some paper. I’ll glue the paper onto it, paint it with latex paint, put it in the oven so it stretches the paper…rubber bands for frets, nails for tuners.’ I just dreamed up this cool little banjo, and I made it.” No telling exactly how Furtado, who grew up in Pleasanton, Calif., got banjos in his head.
“It’s not like my folks listened to it,” he says, “or anyone around me. It wasn’t even that I dug bluegrass—I just pretty specifically dug the banjo.”
Furtado’s boyhood love of the instrument would eventually lead him to study music and art at California State University, Hayward (now CSU East Bay). But after winning the first of two National Bluegrass Banjo Championship titles at age 19 (in 1987, later reclaiming his crown in 1991), he left college to tour the country. Furtado arned a spot on the influential folk label Rounder, and released two albums of increasingly stylized banjo music. It was all he thought he’d ever want to do. “Man, I would get off tour and hole up and play for six or seven hours a day [with the banjo], playing Irish tunes, studying bebop—anything I could do.”
But after coming off tour for his second album, Within Reach, Furtado, 42, suddenly felt limited by his instrument. He wanted to try something new. “It was scary,” he says. “I had built up a reputation as a banjo player and come to the realization that that’s not what I wanted to do.” The slide guitar was Furtado’s new muse, and he’s played it—alongside his faithful banjo—ever since. But this would be far from the last evolution in his sound.
In 2001, he got that itch again: There was something more out there that Furtado wanted to learn. And though he’d dabbled in singing while jamming with friends (“I learned to sing in front of a crowd,” Furtado says of early jams), it took a fundamental change of lifestyle to become a songwriter. “I remember diving into a bunch of poetry and getting into a bunch of literature, and listening to all this music I’ve never heard before,” he says. “It kind of became this whole new awakening process for myself. There were so many things I had not learned about, since I quit college early to go on the road.” So when Furtado released 2004’s These Chains, it threw critics and fans for a complete curve: The plugged-in bluesy pop disc had as much in common with Tom Petty as it did with Doc Watson.
Furtado’s latest record, 2008’s Deep Water, is almost unrecognizable from those early albums for Rounder. Produced by Sean Slade (whose discography includes releases from Hole, Radiohead and Dinosaur Jr.), it’s an eclectic romp that takes advantage of the studio setting. Though it opens with the twisting Delta/Celtic instrumental “The Bawds of Euphony,” most of the disc’s songs feature a full band and Furtado’s aching vocals. Sometimes it’s soft pop (the titular tune clocks in at just over three minutes, and features a smooth hook that wouldn’t sound wholly out of place on a Christian radio show) and sometimes it’s more rocking (the minimal “Lighten Up Your Load” is somewhere between Tom Waits’ “Get Behind the Mule” and Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus”). Furtado has many muses—a quick look through his iPod reveals albums from Sigur Ros, Bon Iver, Fateh Ali Khan, Karan Casey and the Low Anthem—and they start to leak out in all directions on Deep Roots.
For Furtado, who has called Portland home since 2001, there’s no clear career path to follow. That’s what makes him fascinating. “When I was a kid I used to listen to Bela Fleck all the time, and I’d compare my career to his. And then when I fell out of the banjo thing I’d think, ‘OK, Ry Cooder—let’s see what he’s done,’” Furtado says. “But I think I’m done with that. I can only do it the way I do it.”
SEE IT: Furtado begins a three-week residency at the Woods on Tuesday, Jan. 19. Jeremy Wilson and Casey Neill are slated to collaborate. 9 pm. $6. 21+.
