Frog Song features the 24-year-old's singing and acoustic guitar playing on seven mostly original songs that harken back to the folk tradition — more Appalachia and British Isles than the electric blues he's known for playing.
"I had been strumming around on the acoustic more around my house and also starting to write poems," the Keller native says. "I guess it was in the last three or so years [that] I started to get into some of the other styles of American folk music. The kind of stuff that came out of the mountains. I was starting to listen to a lot of people like Jean Ritchie and a lot of that's coming from a European influence."
Bishop says this music discovery led him to stumble "onto a lot of cool, great European singers" such as Ewan MacColl and Dominic Behan.
"And it was totally ringing all my bells because the poems and the stories they tell are always so good and the phonetics and language is so good," he says. "And then there are these great melodies. I've been exploring that stuff over the last couple of years and wanted to try my own hand at it."
Bishop says he's getting more confident as a songwriter.
"I always considered myself a guitar player first," he says. "But lately I've been having fun manipulating words in the same way that I feel like I manipulate guitar notes."
The bluesman adopted a staple of the folk tradition: learning a song and then repurposing it into something new.
"Eventually I just started tweaking the melodies and inserting my own words," he says. "You do that enough and you kind of get your own songs."
There was a time, he says, that if he found himself working on a song that sounded even remotely like another, he would toss it out.
"But [I've developed] a new perspective that creating is picking up where someone else might have left off," he says. "One guy who really helped me stop being afraid of that is Bob Dylan. He was so unafraid of that. He was very brave. Not only was great art created, but it's through people like him that I've learned about, like I mentioned, Dominic Behan. I only learned about him because Bob Dylan used the melody of Behan's song 'Patriot Game for his song 'With God On Our Side.'"
Bishop's "Jack O' Diamonds" shares a title and one line with a song recorded by Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the rest of the song is a Bishop original. And although "Mosquito Moan" is also the title of a Jefferson song, Bishop's lyrics and melody are his own.
His song "Ballad of a Chore Boy" comes at least in part from a real-life experience. When money is tight, Bishop does yard work around his adopted hometown of Austin.
"I really do chore work to make money if I need to," he says. "So, I just kind of ran with that idea. Ideally, I'd like to just play music. But when it gets a little tight, it's good to be outside using your hands."
To help make ends meet, Bishop is starting to play solo acoustic shows around Austin and DFW, along with live dates with his band je'Texas, whose Facebook page describes it as “psychedelic, acid blues rock.” The group released a self-titled album in January and is working on a second release before heading to Spain in November for a tour.
Bishop occasionally plays dates in Dallas-Fort Worth with his longtime blues trio, featuring bassist Cadillac Johnson and drummer Dirk Cordes.
Some DFW blues enthusiasts may be disappointed that he has branched out into other genres. After all, guitarist and Fort Worth native Freddie Cisneros said he "is the kind of blues player that comes around once in a lifetime. The kid is that good,” when Bishop was still in high school. But anyone who saw Bishop's incendiary set at The Cicada in Fort Worth earlier this summer can attest that the guitarist's blues chops are better than ever.
"I think I've just naturally broadened over the last few years and learned to find that brutal honesty in a lot of styles of music. I just naturally slipped out of my blues purist phase and I'm glad that happened because I appreciate blues music more now that I listen to and try my hand at other styles." – Dylan Bishop
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Bishop thinks his forays into other genres are part of a natural growth process.
"Obviously, for quite a good amount of time, I was very devout to the blues," he says. "The rawer, the more authentic it sounded to me, the better. And the further you deviated from the real low-down stuff, I just wasn't into. And that's cool. I learned a lot and learned to respect the music and I learned about the true history of it."
Bishop had a realization a few years ago that changed the way he looked at "new" music.
"In the last few years I started to realize that those people that were singing that blues that I really loved, yes, it was passed down to them through family and tradition, but it was also very original to them," he says. "It doesn't matter if it's Bo Diddley or Son House. That was their song. That was Bo Diddley's song. That was Son House's song. And it's great to play it and keep the music alive. But I just started to realize that if I can really find my song, then it'll have that same thing that I love about the blues. I can find that in any genre I try my hand at."
Ultimately, Bishop says, what moves him about blues music is the "conviction." He plans to record more of his original acoustic songs this month.
"There's a great empathy and humanity," he says of the genre. "And so, I think I've just naturally broadened over the last few years and learned to find that brutal honesty in a lot of styles of music. I just naturally slipped out of my blues purist phase and I'm glad that happened because I appreciate blues music more now that I listen to and try my hand at other styles."
Regardless of the genre, the one constant in Bishop's life remains his guitar.
"It's the first thing I pick up and I pretty much fall asleep with it every night, too," he says with a laugh. "I just enjoy it so much and I only put it down when I have to. But otherwise, I just play, play, play. And now that I've started writing, it's given me a new sense of urgency. I don't want to waste any time. I feel like if I can be writing songs and getting better on the instrument, that's what I want to do with my time."
