Your backstage pass to the DFW music scene and beyond.
DENTON -- Andrew Tinker knew from a very early age that he wanted to be in music. He even blew off the birth of a baby brother to listen to his dad's copy of Jesus Christ Superstar.
"I was 7 and my mom had him in the house and the whole family was over," the singer/multi-instrumentalist recalls while sitting at a downtown Denton coffeehouse. "My [other] brother and I thought, 'We'll just leave them to it.' We were not interested in that so we went and listened to the album."
That was just the beginning of the musical adventure for Tinker, who went on to be one of the founding members of Dallas' Polyphonic Spree, earn a music degree from the University of North Texas, and more recently release the crafty solo album, It Takes the World, which has been getting airplay locally on KXT/91.7 FM. Tinker plays a free show at Trees in Dallas on Thursday night with two other area bands, the Slack and Fate Lions.
What sets Tinker apart from his contemporaries is his blend of musical chops, plush production and melodic smarts, leading to comparisons to acts with roots in the '70s such as Elton John and Boz Scaggs. "Yeah, for sure, [the '70s] were my biggest influence," says Tinker, 25. "My dad had all these vinyl records when I was a kid.... I would listen to the same records over and over. I knew all the words to [The Who's] Tommy by the time I was 10."
Tinker, who was born in Fort Worth and grew up in DeSoto and Flower Mound, discovered that joining the Polyphonic Spree as a French horn player right out of high school dovetailed neatly with his musical aspirations.
It Takes the World shares the Spree's symphonic sound. "It has some Spree grandiosity," he says. "I knew that I wanted to have some moments where there was a big orchestral sound, and lush moments, but I didn't want it to be whole thing. It was cool to be able to take that from the Spree and then say, 'Here's some R&B, here's some country music.'"
Tinker works in a different style from Denton's most popular current export, Midlake, whose folk-rock bears echoes of the '60s and '70s, but he says he believes that they share a certain respect for roots.
"That was the cool thing about [University of] North Texas," he says. "You go into your first music theory class, it's these old hardwood floors and the desks are all old. I sat down and said, 'Wow, this is the same jazz school that [trombonist] Bones Malone went to.' It hasn't changed a bit. Denton has some of that attitude. We like our heritage."
He funded It Takes the World by himself, so it took a long time to produce.
"I started making it while I was still going to UNT and I told the engineer, 'Here's my budget and we'll just make it whenever you have time,'" Tinker recalls. "From the first scratch track, which I made in my house, to the mastered CD, it took close to two years. I don't want to spend that long on the next record."
In between working on his second album, he's taking other musical jobs, such as conducting the music of Fiddler on the Roof for a high-school production in Flower Mound. But the emphasis is on his solo career.
"I do these [other] things because it makes me a more well-rounded musician," he says. "And I've always shied away from just going to get a job. I had a job right before I went to UNT and I didn't want to do it. I'd rather take a low-paying music gig and get some experience than pretend I want to do something that I don't."
Cary Darling is the Star-Telegram pop culture critic, 817-390-7571
