Official Website

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Austin, TX

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Jack Wilson - guitar, vocals

Raina Rose - guitar, washboard, vocals

Dave Wilmoth - mandolin

Andrew Pressman - bass

With special guest Gary Newcomb 

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  SQUINTO enters through the back door and establishes squatter’s rights. It is water (Jack Wilson), air (Raina Rose), fire (Dave Wilmoth), and earth (Andrew Pressman). It is a tornado of sound, squalor, and joy. It is a rusted dock that has molded but never succumbed to the ageless sea. We count on it and it holds us up. SQUINTO woos, it dazzles, it dares. Feed it, but don’t trust it because it never stays in one place too long. It always gets what it deserves and takes more than it is owed: a bounty, a toll, a stipend, a fortune.

   The members of SQUINTO are scoundrels and outlaws, gutters and alleys, monsters and myths, cul-de-sacs and dead ends, witches and wizards. They are legend and legion. They cheat on their taxes. They do not vote. They don’t believe in gift cards and they always pay in cash. They should either be in jail or in Congress or in both. They are a riot, they are a gang, they are a band.

   Some say Raina (a conjurer from the Oregon coast) met Dave (a drifter from Galveston Bay) hopping trains out of St. Louis on the way to a Rainbow Gathering. There they met Jack, a fallen preacher from Oklahoma via somewhere in the northwest. They lit up every campfire they found out in the dark and lit up each other’s hearts. They hitchhiked out of there, picked up by Andrew fresh off a three year stint for stealing cars in Carmel. SQUINTO was born then, but it always was. 

   The first gig was at Mystic Hot Springs in Utah that night. Thousands of people claim to have seen that show, but only a dozen were actually there. From small things big things come. SQUINTO has played bars, bar mitzvahs, fireman’s balls, Elks Lodges, the White House, theaters and festivals from Kansas to Japan, and Trophy’s. They lived in the sewers under Austin for years when tech moved in and the rents went up. Now they live on the endless road, as American as endless war, soldiers of song. 

   Just some of the stories: they refused to wear pants during a Tonight Show appearance and were banned, they have never eaten the same thing twice, they don’t drink much but they do drink often, they don’t believe in toothpaste, they are multilingual, they own mineral rights to a vast tract of land above the Eagle Ford Shale, they dreamed they saw the army ants go ridin’ to the river bed, they are all direct descendants of Townes Van Zandt, they believe recliners are bad luck and never sit in them, they do not believe in underwear, they don’t use washcloths but they do use loofahs, they are more New York City than Colorado but more Hill Country than West Texas, they make their own instruments, they grow their own food, and every morning they wake up and they make their bed…every morning they make their bed.

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- Von Rhodes

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