By Staff Writer
Although he’s often closely associated with the Lone Star State since originally taking up residence in Dallas, Texas in the early ‘90s, vocalist/guitarist Shawn Pittman is actually an Oklahoma native. Pittman was born in the small town of Talihina at the Choctaw Nation Indian Hospital and raised in Cleveland County, Oklahoma. At eight years old he began taking piano lessons under the encouragement of his mother, but later began sneaking into his older brother’s room to play his drum kit. By age of fourteen Shawn had switched to guitar and was soon introduced to the mysterious sounds of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters by Bracken Hale, a good friend and member of his middle school football team. Their friendship would prove significant as Hale would later collaborate with Pittman on writing material for several of his albums. A friend he met while playing basketball at the local ‘Y’; Ben Bigby, introduced teenage Pittman to his father Bernard in Little Axe, Oklahoma. Pittman recalls: “Bernard showed me Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, and Albert King. He also told me I need to learn to sing. I took his advice.”
After seven years in Dallas (1993-1999) and fourteen years in Austin (2000-2013), Pittman moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma where he now resides closer to family and took time off to finish a degree in Information Technology. During this time, he also released his eleventh album Backslidin Again (2015). In 2018 Pittman recorded his twelfth album Everybody Wants to Know with longtime friend and drummer Jay Moeller, which was released on the European label CrossCut Records. In March 2020, Pittman returned with Make It Right, in partnership with Netherlands-based Continental Record Services (CRS).
Blue-E-News caught up to Pittman in early May, while everyone is still pretty much quarantined at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He agreed to be interviewed for our ‘5 Quick Questions’ series, Coronavirus edition. Here’s how it went.
BEN: Now that the COVID-19 situation has engulfed the music business, how have your immediate and long-term recording and touring plans changed?
SP: Luckily (depends on how you look at it I guess) I had a release this past March that probably would have been postponed had we known sooner how bad this would be. I have lost some Spring gigs, but they have all been re-scheduled. I am hoping to be able to complete an upcoming tour at the end of July to mid-August, but it’s kind of week-to-week. The talent buyers so far are saying it’s a go as things start to open up.
BEN: Let’s say the bars and restaurants where you perform open back up soon. Do you have any trepidation about performing at these venues at the present time?
SP: None at all. My wife is one of those front-line workers. She has to perform physical therapy with COVID patients every day. She has been tested a lot and come up negative. We feel like we already had it. I will probably not shake hands or hug anyone, though (laughs).
BEN: What have you done, music/performance-wise, to keep yourself active and visible in the music community during the Quarantine?
SP: I have learned how to do some live streaming and that has brought in some tip money through PayPal. I have also made videos of some solo performances and posted it on Social Media. It’s brought to my attention perhaps more than ever, the importance of Social Media and how to use those platforms as promotional tools.
BEN: Have you done any music recording, or created any videos, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and/or do you have anything planned/in the works?
SP: I have recently been a part of some live streams where they have asked a lot of artists to play a couple of songs in connection with a radio pledge drive for a Dallas station. I also just released a teaser on my Facebook page with some video of the recording of my last album along with part of a track.
BEN: What lessons do you think will be learned in the long-term, regarding the music and ascertainment business, as a result of the Coronavirus music stoppage?
SP: Well, it’s hard to say because how do you prepare for something like this? I suppose we could have better preparations in place for the future, but it still depends on where things like this come from. How prepared can you be if a virus originates in a nation and that nation doesn’t allow for the truth to come out until after it’s too late? I guess for now at least, we will have to get used to playing gigs with not many people around.
More on Shawn Pittman at https://shawnpittman.com/; https://www.facebook.com/shawnpittmanmusic/; and https://twitter.com/Shawn_J_Pittman.
