This is my conversation with Steve Balsamo. It took place on 1/21/23 from his home in the UK.
"a pure and beautiful voice" - Robert Plant
Born and raised in Swansea, UK, I started out singing in rock bands as a teenager before I came to the public's attention in the mid '90s by way of a beard, long hair and a loincloth (look here).
Signing to Columbia Records soon after the messiah complex wore off, I was molded into a poppy/rocky/folky/country-ish artist - nothing like covering all the bases - and made an album, All I Am. Despite the musical schizophrenia, I had a ton of fun travelling the world and writing lots of songs, and I even got to play live on Top Of The Pops (look here).
Along with 3 mates I formed a country rock band, The Storys, made 3 albums and toured the globe with the great and the good. You can check us out here.
I am part of an ongoing prog/electronica project with Rob Reed of Magenta called chimpanA. The first album upset Q Magazine so much that they declared it was 'drowning in a sea of pretentiousness'.
The recently released second album, The Empathy Machine arrived to some fantastic reviews, and you can listen to it here . You can see a very cool video for one of the songs, The Calling, here.
​A little while ago I made an Americana/Country album with Rosalie Deighton, and you can find it here. In between these adventures, I got to write songs for lots of artists including Meatloaf (look here), Slash (look here), and Cliff (look here) worked with heroes Jon Lord of Deep Purple (look here), Eric Woolfson of The Alan Parsons Project (look here), and even gave a singing lesson to Robert Plant (hear that and many other name-dropping stories in this lovely interview).
​Over the last few years, I've been recording a collection of old, new, borrowed and blue songs for a series of 4 EPs. Described as "country/Americana-tinged tracks of mature AOR influenced music" (thanks Lyric Magazine), I intend to use the EPs as a place to musically reflect on where I've been, see where I'm at, and get a loose direction as to where I'm going.
Words feature very heavily in this genre and I'm enjoying wrestling lyrics to the mat, trying to really get inside the songs. I'm digging deep to soul mine my truth right now, and I'm probably the happiest musically I've ever been!
​While the world ground to a halt during the pandemic, my old Storys compadre Andy Collins and ace Liverpudlian song-smith Pete Riley got together every week on Zoom to put the world to rights. The Monday lunchtime sessions turned in songwriting jams, and quickly we had a bunch of sweet tunes.
We've decided to commit the songs to tape and Balsamo Collins Riley was born. We have an EP in the pipeline.