About Trey Merrill
Trey Merrill left home at seventeen with a thumb out and a freight train schedule he was making up as he went. He didn’t know what a Deadhead was yet. His only reference point for what he was doing was the word his grandmother used: hobo. It fit well enough.
He came off the road eventually, drifted toward New Orleans, tended bar in the French Quarter, and spent the better part of three years drinking himself blind in one of the few cities on earth that will encourage that without judgment. Then, at twenty-eight, he sobered up, pointed himself toward Seattle at the height of the grunge movement, and earned a Music Business and Video Production degree from the Art Institute of Seattle by the time he was thirty. It was the beginning of a career that would take him everywhere the music went.
And the music went everywhere.
He built stages — not in any modest sense of the phrase. He was on the crew for the Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over tour, Pink Floyd’s Division Bell tour, the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge tour, and Lollapalooza in 1993 and 1994, moving city to city as some of the most ambitious concert productions in rock history went up and came down around him. He worked as a union stagehand and manager, road manager, production manager, entertainer coach driver, music journalist, and concert promoter. He logged time on 26 feature films. He learned to drive a tour bus from Tab Benoit on a year-long run across the United States. He has recently driven for Jefferson Starship, Tyler Braden, the Gray Havens and others. He stage managed for Andrew Gold and Fantastic Negrito. He did road work for Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and had the rare privilege of producing some of the last sessions Gate ever played on — work that carries the particular weight of knowing it was nearly the end of something irreplaceable. He spent four years managing and producing the Benjy Davis Project, the kind of long-haul artist relationship that teaches you more about music, human nature, and patience than any amount of time spent on your own career.
In between, and sometimes all at once, he was living the life that would eventually become the foundation of his songwriting. His path carried him through backstage corridors and truck stops and late-night highways and, eventually, open water — captaining a 54-foot sailboat called the Starlight off the coast of Corfu, which is either the end of one kind of story or the beginning of something he’s still figuring out. He has lived in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and now Austin. New Orleans never let go.
It never does.
In Merrill’s songs, New Orleans is more than a city. It is mythology, refuge, temptation, beauty, danger, music, ghosts, survival, and reinvention all tangled together. His influences are the ones you’d expect from someone who came up hard and read everything: Springsteen, Dylan, Prine, McMurtry, Robert Earl Keen, Roger Waters, The Rolling Stones and Phish. His artistic compass has been shaped by the example and encouragement of Mary Gauthier and Rodney Crowell — writers who reinforced his belief that the most powerful songs are the ones willing to stay in the room with the difficult truth.
Merrill’s songs are cinematic in detail and plain-spoken in cadence. They move like prose, breathe like memory, and land somewhere between a road story and a reckoning. There is wear and tear in them, but also humor, wonder, and the stubborn belief that redemption can still be found long after most people stop looking for it.
His debut original work is out now. It took the long way around to get here. That’s always been the only road that made sense.