Pearly Gate Music

Pearly Gate Music is an incredibly gifted gentleman by the name of Zach Tillman (although he records and usually plays live with a stylistic variety of full-band options), who makes beautiful, challenging, simple-yet-complicated songs structured around his extraordinary singing, vivid lyrics, and unusual melodic sense. Sometimes conjuring the feeling of a punk rock religious revival in an old-time prairie tent, sometimes stripped down to spare acoustic-guitar-and-lovely-croon, Tillman's music sounds as if it were written and performed by a bedraggled dust bowl poet influenced by whatever popular songs from the poor folk circuit were being sung after dinner in the parlors of his youth — and who somehow managed to supernaturally absorb the sound of Lubbock circa 1955, Laurel Canyon circa 1968 and Berlin circa 1980.