“With a notebook and a pen/You know I can’t pretend” “Verona”
Take one look at his tousled locks, wire-rim glasses and lanky build, and 20-year-old, Nashville-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Drew Pulliam appears to be a cross between an angelic choirboy and pop icon Buddy Holly. Listen to the music on his remarkable debut album, Back of My Mind, on producer Steve Azar’s Delta Mississippi-based Ride Records, and you will understand the prescient title of his first EP, “16 Going on 60,” released in 2023.
Filled with bittersweet observations on adolescent angst, romance found and lost, and the vagaries of love, Pulliam is truly an old soul in a young body. It’s a tribute to those influences that range from his favorite songwriter Leonard Cohen to the rhythmic drive of the Lumineers, the Americana roots of Ray LaMontagne, the Avett Brothers, Shakey Graves, Fleet Foxes, Dan Auerbach and Caamp to the epic orchestral flourish of Leonard Bernstein, the Beatles and another idiosyncratic personal pick, America.
Born in Jonesboro, Arkansas and home-schooled until high school in a church-going Christian household, Drew traces his musical roots to performing piano and guitar on a home stage under the guidance of his mother, head of the local community theatre.
