GUY RAZ, HOST:
A.A. Bondy knows a thing or two about the music business - good and bad. When he was in his early 20s, he was signed to a major label with disastrous results. His band broke up. He quit music for a while, made a solo comeback. Now, Bondy has returned with a new sound, as we hear from Clay Masters of member station NET Radio.
CLAY MASTERS, BYLINE: It's Friday night at The Waiting Room Lounge in Omaha, Nebraska. More than 150 people are milling around waiting for A.A. Bondy to take the stage. His new album called "Believers" came out two months ago and caught fans like Andre Steinbergs by surprise.
ANDRE STEINBERGS: I don't want to sound disappointed, but it really struck me as being very different from the first two because it didn't have the finger-style picking, but I do like that it's very moody and atmospheric, that it's dark. It's one of those records that I would listen to when the mood struck me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
MASTERS: It's taken Bondy over a decade to create a world he can call his own. His career started when he was still in his early 20s. He was the leader of Verbena, a band that emerged from the ashes of the 1990s grunge movement and was signed to Capitol Records. Its major-label debut was produced by Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BABY GOT SHOT")
MASTERS: Verbena ultimately flopped.
: We wanted to be like - I don't know - like Led Zeppelin or something. We're, like, fooled by some kind of, like, shiny things left out in the dust, you know, and thought that we could just go out and collect them. And, you know, we'd have our own plane or something, you know? And it just went, like, epically wrong.
MASTERS: After the band split up, Bondy quit music. He fled to the Catskills Mountains in New York. He fixed well pumps, dog-sat and read a lot - dark books by Cormac McCarthy, classics like "Moby Dick" - and he continued to play music for himself.
: It was meditative, you know, just sitting there playing guitar for hours again. I've been playing guitar since I was 14 or 15 years old, but to do it in a way that's completely new to me was amazing. You know, I felt like a child or something.
MASTERS: It was then he stumbled across records by acoustic guitar pioneer John Fahey and was particularly entranced by a video of blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU GOT TO WALK THAT LONESOME VALLEY")
MASTERS: Three years after Verbena broke up, Bondy began writing his solo debut.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "VICE RAG")
MASTERS: He says it only took him eight days.
: It was just like a torrent. Like, I just couldn't shut it off, you know? It was almost uncomfortable in a way, just kind of like I had to go out and write another song, you know? You'll be watching TV, and you're like, here comes another one. It was amazing, you know?
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MASTERS: Bondy was happy to be recording again, but he still didn't feel like he was offering anything original. Now, with his new record, he does.
: I don't know. Bjork probably started out completely original...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
: â¦but like most people have to, you know, toil in the shadows as somebody else for a little while, and then they can eventually wean themselves off of that. It took me, you know, a really long time to do it.
MASTERS: Nearly a decade, a failed shot at the majors, some muddy boots and an acoustic guitar. For NPR News, I'm Clay Masters.
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