Quality Americana

By Patrick Sullivan

Beatle or Stone: Stone

Lair: The Redbird Listening Room and The Road

Super Power: Inspiration

Influences: All of them, but a clear Focus on Texas Songwriters from the olden days

He is as Texas as they come, with his half cocked cowboy hat and a cheshire smile the size of Houston.

If you’ve ever spent some time with Dallas, you might have felt his intense nature. To me it feels like he was loaded into a slingshot, pulled back, and then decided he wanted to stay on the ground for awhile- like if someone were to let him go, he might just shoot out into space. Fortunately for fans like me, and his beautiful family, he’s probably gonna hang out on earth for a while. I believe that love mixed with intensity is the secret catalyst behind his wonderful songs and mega-entertaining show. 

Dallas is a great songwriter, with enough life experience to swap yarns with the most seasoned troubadours, and this article could never attempt to tell his story. This series of articles is called Super Heroes Of Song because I wanted to highlight those songwriters who go out of their way to support other artists. I cannot think of many folks who do more for other songwriters than Dallas Burrow. 

I began our conversation with the usual Beatles/Stones fence. He is the first Super Hero to choose the Rolling Stones. Burrow told me he “liked the spirit of the Stones and the attitude of the Stones.” He told me “it didn’t hurt” that he had seen them in concert. I was curious about other heavies he might have seen? One time in Austin he saw Tom Petty “make it rain”.

I’ve known Dallas for a while now, and I’ve gotten to talk to him quite a bit, he really feels like family to me nowadays. It was a real treat to get to ask one of my favorite people, and a musical mentor, whatever questions I wanted. I asked him how his whole passion for music started. It all started with his dad, Mike Burrow.

“I think my earliest memories of music were my dad’s music,” Burrow said. “He wasn’t pushing it on me, he was just doing it because he liked to do it. And that’s the way I look at it myself.” 

I wondered when he first started participating in the music? 

“I can remember grabbing the strings on his guitar,” Burrow said. “I can remember finding the guitar laying around the house and sort of like trying to invent picking patterns and stuff with my fingers when I was a young kid.” 

Dallas recounted one Christmas, around the age of ten, he received a Jimmy Hendrix cream and white Fender Squire, and right then his pops promptly taught him House of the Rising Sun. Not too many years later he formed with his first band and entered the local eighth grade talent show. They performed “Sweet Home Alabama” and won. This was when the “bug” bit him.

Dallas Burrow at the Redbird Listening Room. Photo by Patrick Sullivan.

I was a fan of Dallas Burrows music about a year or so before we really got to know each other and became friends. I own all of his albums and have him on all my music streaming playlists and shuffles. To me his songs are passionate, expressive, and personal while still reaching out in some indiscriminate companionship. Heavy sometimes, like I prefer. 

Dallas is very proud of where he is from… like most of us Texans. His songs are heavily influenced by this place and its people and the troubadour song writers that have been around him most if not all of his life. If you are ever lucky enough to sit around a campfire, you will quickly figure out that his songs cover quite a few genres. I have always been curious about the differences writers have in their creative processes.

”Its like drawing blood,” Burrow said. “Like if you hit a vein and kind of get it to start flowing. If I can get it going, If I can create that vacuum and draw the whole thing out, usually it’s all there.” 

He told me if he can “catch” a story or an idea. If he can chase it, usually he can make it happen. I asked him to be more specific- like, what happens first? Idea? Lyrics? Piano melody or guitar riff? 

”I like words a lot,” Burrow said. “The words are the reason as much as anything for me.” 

He said that sometimes he will be playing something and it will evoke a feeling or a story, and that he is “always looking.” He remarked that colloquialisms are a great tool to use when writing songs. He said colloquialisms are “a great way for language to express itself by region or by culture, the accidental ways that words get bent and become their own little flavor in a place. Stuff like that is great stuff to sprinkle in.” 

This reply made me think of some of the travels I knew he had had in his life, and their contributions to his musical inspirations. 

“Songwriting has also been like therapy,” Burrow said, “like teenage angst about whatever might have been. When you go through life, the challenges, whenever you experience your first heart break. That’s always a great motivator for some songs to pour out.” 

He suggested a song could be an “answer to a riddle”. I identified with that, and thought of one of my favorite Dallas Burrow songs “Keep on Trying.”

We had a cool setting for this conversation. We were in his music room, surrounded by instruments and records and music books and note books and pictures of his loved ones. Books about Townes Van Zandt, Slaid Cleaves and Bob Schnieider. There was his Aunt Pat’s record collection, vinyls from the 60s and 70s.

“Even if I never open or listen to any of these books or records, I just like having the mojo of that stuff in my space,” Burrow said. 

I saw boxes of stuff in his closet that he said were poetry and drawings from his childhood. I wanted to know more about his work. I asked him how he knew when a song was good?

“You just have to write a song because you want to write a song,” Burrow said. “I’ve got songs nobody will ever hear.” 

He always brought it back to that, that we just have to do it because we want to do it, because we love to do it. I tried to sneak in a question about his professional aspirations, but he dodged it saying he wanted to be a “decent” person and a man of family and faith with peace of mind. Throughout our conversation, when I brought up the music “business” he would force me to delineate between it and art. “If you like making the art,” Burrow said, “then you’re going to do it anyway.”

We discussed how many artists from the past never really did have a huge listening audience. 

“Things that are mass produced are rarely the best thing, It’s the small batch stuff that is ‘the stuff,’” Burrow said. “I think that applies to music. It’s ok to be a small batch artist, and probably healthier.”

As we neared the end of our time, I asked him what he would tell songwriters that are thinking of trying to do this for a living. Again he made the distinction.

“I do try to encourage anyone who wants to make music to make music if they want to,” Burrow said. “Cause I know it’s fun.” 

I pressed him further and finally got his answer. 

“I think you just gotta go out there and figure it out.” I couldn’t help but laugh my face off. Then he amended, “follow your heart. Don’t sell your soul. Don’t do it for the wrong reasons. Do it for the purity of making music.”

Like every one of my other Super Heroes of Song, I asked about the influences of A.I. on songwriters and music. He didn’t have much to say about it except this- 

“It just doesn’t matter that much to me. It’s an interesting tool, I guess. It just has nothing to do with what I do,” Burrow said. “Most popular music is sort of fake anyway. Who cares if it’s a robot or not?” 

Patrick Sullivan and Dallas Burrow at the Luckenbach Dance Hall.

I have been fortunate to spend time with a fair amount of artists in my days, and slowly I have been working on a theory: it seems that the vast majority of artists I have gotten to know believe in something unseen and unknown. Metaphysical. I theorize that this connection is almost imperative. I asked him if there was an unseen force in art, and if he felt a connection to it? 

“God is a creator,” Burrow said. “God is the creator, and if we are made in his image, then we are also creators. And so the life force of the universe is a creative spirit.”

Dallas inspires me. He helps me believe in myself as a songwriter. He even lets me share the stage with him sometimes. He does this for a lot of people. At his family’s place, The Redbird Listening Room, he and his family (especially his awesome mom Carolyn) help a ton of dreamers like me. There is no quantifying what Dallas Burrows contribution to songwriters has already been. Truly of the the most Super of The Heroes of Songwriting.

Support the Artist

More information about Dallas Burrow can be found here.

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