John Wesley Harding

When John Wesley Harding first hit MTV and college radio, he was immediately pegged as "The Next Elvis Costello." (To be fair, having The Attractions' Pete Thomas and Bruce Thomas as the rhythm section of his band The Good Liars certainly didn't help.) As a matter of fact, Harding had at least as much in common with contemporaries like Nick Lowe, Billy Bragg and Robyn Hitchcock, and as his tongue-in-cheek stage name makes plain, he looked to first-generation singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs for inspiration. His somewhat overlong and overproduced major-label albums (Here Comes the Groom, The Name Above The Title, and Why We Fight) of the early '90s showcased a clever lyricist, but it wasn't until 1996's John Wesley Harding's New Deal that he found the more stripped-down folk-rock sound that best suited his increasingly heartfelt songs. Though he kept a following devoted enough to allow him to self-release an ongoing set of demos-and-rarities discs under the series title Dynablob (and to repackage his 1988 live debut It Happened One Night with the scrapped original sessions for what would have been his first studio album), the Cambridge-educated Harding moved into literature under his given name, Wesley Stace, with the Dickensian comic novel Misfortune. Stace's follow-ups, By George and Charles Jessold, Considered As A Murderer, garnered increasingly solid reviews. Along with his literary pursuits, Harding maintained his musical career, signing to Yep Roc Records for 2011's The Sound Of His Own Voice.