Steve Forbert September 20, 2008

As a restless 21-year-old, Steve Forbert quit his truck-driving job in his native Meridian, Mississippi and headed for Manhattan with little more than his acoustic guitar. There, he busked for spare change at Grand Central Station, performed at Folk City and opened for the likes of Talking Heads and John Cale at CBGB, building sufficient local notoriety to win a deal with the CBS-distributed Nemperor label. Released at the height of the new wave explosion, Forbert's 1978 debut Alive On Arrival mixed spare acoustic introspection with scrappy rock 'n' roll and became one of the year's most acclaimed albums.

In the quarter-century since, the Mississippi-bred, Nashville-based singer/songwriter has built a deeply personal body of work that's won him a reputation for clear-eyed insight and plainspoken eloquence. In the process, he's evolved from the wide-eyed young troubadour of his early classics Alive On Arrival and Jackrabbit Slim to the mature, bittersweet outlook of his more recent work, which surveys darker territory with hard-won empathy and deeply-ingrained rock 'n' roll soul. Those qualities are prominent on Just Like There's Nothin' to It, the follow-up to Forbert's Grammy-nominated Jimmie Rodgers tribute album Any Old Time and his first new album of original material in four years.

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