Ben Franklin said that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. On his latest CD, Death and Texas LP , Chris Huff adds his own twist to this aphorism. “In the last few years, the only certainties in life that I have observed are that all things must pass, and that inevitably I would end up back in Texas,” he says. 

Recorded on the road while freelancing with the national tour of a Broadway show, Death and Texas LP took 7 years to complete, in the tradition of albums by groups like The Blue Nile and Lucinda Williams. In that time, Chris got married, had a baby, and traveled to all 50 states as well as China, Korea, Australia, and all the Canadian provinces. Along the way, he personally encountered earthquakes, tornadoes, giant hand-sized spiders, hurricanes, and the most dreadful of all disasters: George W. Bush. 

“The album was not meant to be a mirror of the Bush presidency,” Chris says. “There are really no political songs on the CD. But cowboys and war have been a major theme of the last 8 years, and on the road I certainly saw the ugly, selfish side of America as well as the beautiful side.” 

A native New Yorker, Chris discovered that there was a whole country on the other side of the Hudson River when he spent a summer in Kentucky during college. He learned the roots of American music with two bluegrass musicians that summer, and came back to school strumming his guitar and trying to write songs like Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams Sr, and Robert Johnson. 

Coupled with his teenage love of British rock from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, he began to attempt to bridge the Atlantic Ocean in his own music combining the best of both worlds. A busking spin around Europe led him back to NYC for the 90s, where he played as a sideman with Peter Yarrow (Peter, Paul, and Mary), Amanda Green (lyricist, High Fidelity), and Chuck Hammer (Lou Reed, David Bowie, “Trauma: Life in the ER” composer) among countless others. He played venues in NYC from Carnegie Hall and CBGB’s to the Sidewalk Café and the Bitter End. 

Handing a CD to David Bowie and bonding with the artist on davidbowie.com led to Chris headlining a picnic for Bowienet in 2000 and writing introductory liner notes for Bowie’s Live and Well CD. “I quite like Chris’s music,” Bowie said.

Chris’s last CD North Cathedral Way earned him a place as a finalist in the 2001 Independent Music Awards sponsored by Musician’s Atlas. He appeared on radio shows like WAMC-FM’s Hudson River Sampler in Albany, NY, and toured around upstate NY playing places like Caffe Lena in Saratoga. 

So what else about Texas? “Over half of our extended family lives there,” Chris says. “I’ve been to every major city. I’m obsessed with the JFK assassination. Bush being the former governer lends a sinister cast to the ‘Death’ pairing. I actually quite love Texans and their independent spirit; there are many people there who have excellent politics. Daniel Johnston and Townes Van Zandt are from Texas. Richard Borge, who did the artwork for the cover, really captured a Southwestern feeling without getting too country. This is not a country or Americana CD, but a rock CD that fuses British and American elements to express a certain kind of ‘rock commonality’, a tribal language that everybody who loves guitar-based music shares.”