Travis Shawn Hill

Acoustic / Experimental Santa Cruz, CA

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Happy Birthday! Album and Webbum Out Now!

My latest album, as well as its companion webbum, has just been launched. You can download the album free of charge by clicking here. If you dig it, you can donate to access the exclusive webbum, which is a complete online aural/visual/literary experience. Think back to the days when you'd bring home a record from the store, put it on, and spend hours admiring the album art, memorizing the lyrics and feeling a certain smug satisfaction in being clued in on all the inside jokes in the liner notes. That novelty has all but disappeared in today's world of instant internet gratification. The launch of Happy Birthday as a webbum is an attempt to reclaim some of that lost joy, an opportunity for people to slow down and take at least a few minutes out of their day to enjoy the entirety of the musical/artistic experience.

Download Happy Birthday! | Donate to Access Webbum!

Billboard

From NPR.org, April 21, 2008:

"Travis Shawn Hill wanted to prove you don't need a major record label to put out an album... or a band, for that matter. Using a home computer and a couple of microphones, the singer-songwriter from Santa Cruz, Calif. wrote and recorded more than a dozen songs in February and posted them online for this year's RPM Challenge. The album he came up with is called "A Bright Wind", featuring the infectiously upbeat song "Sing." "[The track] was written and recorded in an afternoon, in order to cheer myself up," says Hill. "Its message is a simple one: that happiness comes from within", which is a message that resonates throughout the album, A Bright Wind. Hill has been playing music since he was five. After forming and playing with a number of bands in high school and college, he decided to go solo. He says A Bright Wind is "devoted to the idea that each life is defined solely by the person living it, and that to experience life to the fullest, it is necessary to pursue one's dream, whether that dream be constant throughout one's life, or constantly changing."

-Robin Hilton, NPR.org's "Second Stage"

Bio, by By Scott Karoly, KZSC:

"I first saw Travis play guitar in his garage when I was sixteen. He told me that I could sing, so we played a song and by the end, his right forearm was bleeding. He'd been playing so vigorously that the inside of his arm would smash against his guitar until there was blood all over everything; the strings, the body, the pickups. He cut the toes off of a sock and wrapped it around his injured arm and kept going. At this point, he had been recording music in the study of his parents' house on a PC running Windows 98 that he had completely skinned to look like it was running Mac OS X. The computer consequently crashed and burned, but that's beside the point. Both of these things kind of sum up Travis' music - a seamless blending of the completely tactile and material with something futuristic and effortlessly created. Combining flutes with synths and bells and acoustic guitar all recorded on a damaged four-track reel to reel tape recorder, he makes music that sounds so completely warm and organic and real, that it gives you the feeling like there's something coming from somewhere else and you want to listen to it forever. Travis has always made music that was whatever he wanted to make and was influenced by whomever he wanted to influence him. When everyone around him was listening to Glassjaw (and pretending to like it), he was listening to Yo La Tengo, and that was fine. I think we're all happy about that now. There really isn't an instrument that Travis can't play to my knowledge. Travis learned how to play drums by air-drumming on the dashboard of his 1980s Peugeot Sedan until he sat down behind a drum set one day and just played it. (R.I.P. Michél, the car that gave us all a scare when it was going about 10 miles per hour over the Broadway overpass with the pedal to the floor - it was kind of like one of those toy cars you roll backward to wind up and eventually it gets going.) There's something appealing about a musician who records for the sake of the music, rather than for the sake of becoming popular through mass-friend-frenzies on myspace. Some things in life you find for yourself and cherish. These songs fit into that category."

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Discography - see all 4

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  Happy Birthday!

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  A Bright Wind

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  Creation/Distraction

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  I Wanted Everything...