Oklahoma Gazette
Making Every Song Count: Michael Fracasso catches listeners' ears by offering a 'rustic sound with a city sensibility'
by George Lang

On a giant outdoor platform or on a small, intimate stage, Michael Fracasso performs as though he is singing directly to whoever is filling any given seat in the venue.

On Aug. 10, the Austin-based singer-songwriter took the stage at BalloonFest at Wiley Post Airport as part of the Blue Door's massive singer-songwriter showcase. All alone on stage large enough to comfortably seat a 77-piece orchestra, Fracasso stood alone with his guitar and voice, but he filled the stage with his perfectly crafted folk-pop, aiming his songs to both the fans and the curious newcomers, making every song count. It was a skill he picked up playing in Greenwich village during the folk revival of the late Seventies, where performers had one chance to get it right.

"Upon my arrival in New York, the first place I headed to was the Cornelia Street Cafe," Fracasso said in his official bio. "Every Monday night in this Greenwich Village Cafe, a songwriter exchange was held where you could only perform a new song. In the audience and on stage were some of New York's best songwriters of the new fold scene -- Suzanne Vega, The Roches, Mark Johnson, Steve Forbet, et cetera. To get up in that small cafe was intimidating, but the exhilaration of playing is what kept me going."

Fracasso became frustrated by the often pretentious performers holding court at Cornelia Street and Fold City during that time, and set out a frustrating, decade-long quest for fresh musical environs. He frequented the post-punk scene that gave birth to Blondie, Talking Heads and the avant-garde "no wave" movement in New York and spent years volleying between bands, but Fracasso found himself at an impasse by the dawn of the Nineties. Taking the advice of a friend at a major label, Fracasso opted for a dramatic change of environment, following the Southwest-bound road taken by Northeast contemporaries like Slaid Cleaves and moving to Austin.

"I moved to Austin, Texas, with everything that would fit in the back of my Volkswagen Rabbit, which was mostly my guitars," Fracasso said. "While in New York, a reviewer in Variety once described my songs as having a 'rustic sound with a city sensibility,' and in Austin, I found my equivalent."

Fracasso owes that "rustic sound with a city sensibility" to his childhood in Mingo Junction, Ohio, the beaten-down mill town where Michael Cimino filmed 1978's "The Deer Hunter." He worked in the blast furnaces for two days while attending Ohio State University, shoveling broken steel into a wheelbarrow, but was constantly falling down under the oppressive weight of the metal. Fracasso clearly was not cut out for such grueling, backbreaking work, and he eventually realized he was not cutout for Mingo Junction, either.

"As a kid, it was a place for idle summers and a sandlot baseball," he said. "But as I grew older, it became a place to leave."

After years of false starts in New York, Fracasso released his first album, "Love and Trust," in 1993, immediately finding favor with the Austin music press and opening for Lucinda Williams. Signing to Bohemia Beat, he recorded two more well received discs -- "When I Lived in the Wild" and "World in a Drop of Water" -- before recording what many consider his finest work, "Live at the Blue Door," in 2001. Recorded with Charlie Sexton at the Oklahoma City folk venue, "Live at the Blue Door" is a collection of both old favorites and new songs, one that Thom Jurek of the All Music Guide described as "a contender for best singer/songwriter album for 2001, and it should win every poll if there's any justice at all."