Skip to main content[POST-FOLK] Five years ago, Portland musician Dustin Hamman started life again. Sick of writing "sad-bastard, alt-country, feel-sorry-for-me" music, he began penning a musical—casting himself in the lead role.
"There was a monologue that would tie all the songs together, and he was this Southern, rambling dude, and I kept calling him 'Run On'—because he was rambling on," Hamman says. The play was never finished, and yet Hamman has been performing it ever since.
On his 2008 debut album as Run On Sentence, Oh When the Wind Comes Down, Hamman rambles from folk ballads to swampy blues to swinging jazz—often in the same song—while his voice ambles between crooning, scatting, warbling, wailing and even the occasional yodeling.
Hamman has chosen the life of a rambler as well: "I decided the reason I couldn't do the things I wanted to was because I was too attached to stuff. I had debt, I had rent to pay, I had bills." So he simplified. He now lives part-time at a winery in Washington, where he works in exchange for his board, and stays with friends when in Portland. "Sometimes I have $50 in my bank account, but I'm OK with that," he says with a shrug.
The lifestyle allows him to take any gig, anywhere, regardless of notice or pay (while his albums and live shows often feature an ever-evolving band of up to a dozen other musicians, he writes each song so it can be performed solo)—a freedom that has seen him play everywhere from a tiny mining town in the Chihuahuan Desert to the basement of a 16-year-old fan in Illinois.
His freedom also gives him an opportunity to get away from the world, "brush off the city" and create his music. Hamman spent almost five months writing his new album, You, the Darkness, and Me, while at the winery last winter.
"When there's three feet of snow and you hike into the woods, where you can't see any sign of civilization, and there's snowflakes like two inches [wide] falling around you—it's a different kind of silence," he says.
The result, Hamman admits, is a darker album than his first release, but one that seems to fit with this rambling existence he has chosen for himself, inspired by the months spent alone in a place where time and the individual become irrelevant.
That, Hamman says, is what informs the new disc. "It's kind of just about embracing that [darkness] and saying it's OK that I don't know what's going to happen."
Run On Sentence plays the Woods, with Scrimshander, on Saturday, July 17. 9 pm. $8 advance, $10 day of show. 21+.
WWeek 2015