Like k.d. lang and Laurie Anderson, singer/songwriter Dudley Saunders began his music career first as a critically-acclaimed performance artist - only to find the experimental "gothic folk" music he wrote for his pieces take over his career. Described by critics as "surreal, modern folk tales" (VILLAGE VOICE), Dudley's performance art was a fixture on New York's East Village scene in the late '80s. But as he began to merge the music of his native Kentucky with the post-modern jazz and art-rock he heard at the Knitting Factory, he began to draw an entirely new audience who convinced him to put his art-world impulses into music. With its emotional tight-vibrato and wide range, Dudley's voice is often compared to Chris Isaak and Jeff Buckley. But his songs operate more in the scene-painting mode of Leonard Cohen/Tom Waits, and tell hallucinatory tales of bohemian life. In MUSHY-HEADED KID, for instance, a frightened man is "merging with the cracking wall/the crack extends into his face/the girls are bickering in the hall/yeah, he says, I guess/you do belong/in this place." Or there are the "buck-tooth call girls on the corner" in THE RAIN ON 8TH AVENUE, "like red-haired roses in the rain/dropped off by a drunken mourner/on the wrong grave." And, most controversially, LOVE SONG FOR JEFFREY DAHMER (FROM THE LOVER HE SHOULD HAVE HAD), a fantasia about a man turning the tables on the serial killer - who then ends up happy.
