Gill Landry, also known by the stage name of Frank Lemon, is a singer/songwriter and guitarist born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and a member of Old Crow Medicine Show and founding member of The Kitchen Syncopators.
He got his first guitar when he was 5. Landry started The Kitchen Syncopators with his friend Woody Pines in 1998 spending many years busking the streets of New Orleans, the Northwest, and Europe. As he tells the story:
"The Kitchen Syncopators came out of a Vaudeville show that Me, Felix Hatfield, Woody Pines, and Huck Notari were doing called The Songsters. It was a Bread and Puppet—inspired cardboard theater which featured a lot of early American music we were picking up off of our friend Baby Gramps. We'd been starving in shacks in Eugene, Oregon, when me and Woody went to the Oregon Country Fair one day to try busking. I think we made $300 bucks that day, which to us was a fortune at the time."The band recorded several self-released albums and disbanded in 2004 when Gill began to lend vocals and play banjo and steel guitar for Old Crow Medicine Show.
In 2007, Landry released a solo album titled The Ballad of Lawless Soirez on Nettwerk Records. "Coal Black Heaven" from this album was hailed by one reviewer as "something of a hobo haiku to the national collapse and depression looming over every hollowed-out and rusted-through US river town."
In October 2011 he self-released his second solo album titled Piety & Desire—featuring the Felice Brothers, Brandi Carlile, Jolie Holland, Ketch Secor, and Samantha Parton (of the Be Good Tanyas)—where he "creates a whole film and stereo hi-fi noir milieu" by realizing "a dozen rootsy, ambient and mostly catchy hardscrabble southwestern tinged originals."
Landry appeared at the end of Be Good Tanyas video "The Littlest Birds".
Famous quotes containing the word gill:
“Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building—like Tower Bridge—or a classical front put on a steel frame—like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living—not something added, like sugar on a pill.”
—Eric Gill (1882–1940)