When Tim Hockenberry opens his mouth to sing, all talk ceases, faces turn towards the stage, and eyes widen. Out of this aw-shucks handsome face comes an impossibly emotional voice redolent of Ray Charles, Joe Cocker, Louis Armstrong and Tom Waits. Playing, singing, arranging, writing Tim is emerging as one of the most compelling and startling voices of
the 21st Century.

Talents like Tim's bubbles up in strange ways. A gifted child in a clan of gifted (his brother John is an multiple Emmy winning journalist and NPR fixture) at eight years old Tim became obsessed with the trombone (and a unicycle - quite a combination) and began a musical odyssey that would take him from a small town in Michigan onto top stages with Bonnie Raitt, Robert Cray and Steve Miller. While still a teenager, Tim parleyed his meticulous jazz trombone gifts into a seat in trumpeter Clark Terry's jazz band - a seemingly miraculous escape from his artistically isolated existence. But on the brink of a fabulous year-long European tour, Clark Terry fell sick and the tour was cancelled.

Ten years of wandering and dead ends brought him to Northern California and working on pure intuition and the kindness of strangers Tim finally sealed himself up in a Napa, California one-room cabin for six months with a keyboard and a primitive four-track to record what he had in him. What Tim discovered in that time was a way of singing and writing that had nothing to do with his genes or upbringing: from this fair-haired, corn-fed-good-looking face came a new American voice and musical sensibility of irresistible power
and harsh beauty.

When Tim Hockenberry sings and plays piano you hear the R&B of his Detroit influences, the rock of his generation and the jazz that he thought he'd lost as a teenager. Like a handful of blues and gospel-based singers, Tim has the pipes and phrasing that lets him sing anything Billy Strayhorn to Lennon and McCartney to... Tim Hockenberry, and makes you catch your breath each time, stop doing whatever you're doing to hear what comes next. Every song he touches, guileless Broadway ballad to jagged-edge rock, becomes a testimony to the human experience of love, joy, pain and sorrow, somehow musically transformed into a kind of pleasure that you want to seek 
again and again.