As evidenced by Cadillac Road’s title track, a chronicle of his roadtrip to Stanley Marsh’s high plains art mecca Cadillac Ranch, Stayton Bonner is intent on finding inspiration in the most unlikely of places, shadowed regions dusted over in the wake of current top forty acts. Whether singing about the merits of Black Bush whiskey in an Irish pub, strolling the lanes of a second-hand bookshop, or enjoying a seventies easy listening song with his wife, Bonner relates his own experiences and passions into art with melodic and honest writing. Besides producing Cadillac Road, Hunter Perrin and Paul Beebe also play as Bonner’s band on the CD. “Stayton and I met during college,” Perrin relates. “We both had a common interest in bluegrass music and growing facial hair.” Living in LA years later, (his day-job as touring and recording guitarist for John Fogerty keeps him busy,) Perrin heard about Bonner’s songwriting award at North Carolina’s Merlefest and gave him a call. Several tours afterward, they decided to make a record together, enlisting Perrin’s old friend and Houston music-scene mainstay Paul Beebe as a co-producer. Listening to the songs, you may be moved to find yourself looking at the seemingly mundane aspects of life in a whole new way. As Bonner sings about living in the desert on Cadillac Road’s title track, “Here your outside world’s got to come from inside.” When not playing music, Bonner can be found writing journalism, prose, or whatever else he can muster. In November 2006, independent press Three Dog Books published The Bookman, his biography of author Larry McMurtry.