charlie dodrill

Who knew a guitar on a mountaintop would be so useful? When Charlie Dodrill headed to Callao, Utah for two years of solitude, he took few possessions with him to the mountain cabin in the high desert between Utah and Nevada. While the situation might drive some inhabitants to distraction, it drove Charlie, who at the time knew five chords, to his guitar.

Soon he was “accidentally” writing songs flowing from the longings and desires built into all of us. When he began actually putting them down on paper, they might have looked a little strange to anyone with musical knowledge. With no guitar training, his early writing included such chords as “smiley face" and "Triangle (still does this, actually)." He noticed that when he sang, parts of his heart that were not open in thinking and speaking, would blossom when letting emotion flow through music.

Two years later as he was finishing his monastic experience in a rural corner of Missouri, he began sharing his music with others, at which time he learned that while his journey may have been unique, his songs were far more universal than he'd imagined. A friend coaxed him into a garage studio for an early recording session whose charmingly homemade quality did not deter the many friends who wanted to pass them along to others. Eventually he moved to Nashville and found himself playing in places like the Bluebird Café within a year of arriving. When a girl from Texas passed his CD’s along to the wife of producer, Steve Rosen, there began a conversation that became the first step in the creation of "Prologue to this Drama." The addition of gifted studio musicians like Dave Cleveland and Lisa Cochran and the mixing talents of Ben Fowler meant that this would be no ordinary first album. With lyrics which seek to discover the mortal life from the perspective of an immortal God, even in the midst of a broken world, the songs of "Prologue" have played equally well with "test audiences" in venues from colleges to churches to bars and on radio stations scattered through the U.S. and abroad.

He’s taken “Prologue” on tour throughout the U.S. and is currently finishing up his sophomore project, “Eyes of the Exception,” with the usual studio suspects, but adding Dan Needham on drums, Scott Dente and acoustics, and Scat Springs on BGV’s. It’s a fun ride of an album, crossing genres, but still possessing rare depth without taking itself too seriously.

A Magna Cum Laude graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan University, Charlie is a trained fine artist who graduated with a BA in painting and was a record breaking pole vaulter for four years. His fluent Spanish and work with street children led to a senior year spent in Montevideo, Uruguay and a post-graduate stint in Medallin, Colombia, the murder capital of the world. Since then he has traveled extensively throughout India and lived and worked in inner-city Kansas City and Jacksonville, FL. He currently lives in Nashville.



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