Overton was introduced to the old sound by “a
very bad old friend from school” at a bar—“we were too young to be in the place”—and
has been listening to all sorts of old rhythm and blues ever since. "The recordings are old, but the tunes are timeless. That still is how I got
hooked,” he says. “The live experience. The best thing about a live show is you
can dance. I don’t mean jumping around the place like I’m looking to hurt
somebody; I mean with a girl. You can call me anything you want but I still
like to dance in a pair… Sometimes the song is about the dance.”
Overton first picked up the guitar at the age of 15, and
started singing as a result of an of an old band he founded all trying their
hand at vocals before he landed the mic.
The man doesn’t consider himself “very special” for what
he plays, but says “I’ll be playing and singing so long as I’ve got sparks in
my brain. It’s the creativity that I really dig; I can pick up the guitar and
just make something up. That’s instant art. As soon as the thought appears, I
send it through my nerves and out of the guitar. Instant expression—I don’t
even need to wait for the paint to dry.”
While discussing influences, Overton
divulges his “trinity”—Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Jack White. Waits is Overton’s
dream collaborator— “It’d be
wild. I'd stroll over to the piano
like I know what I'm doing and he'd just go to town with an old tire-iron and a
dustbin lid,” he says. “He could growl and I'd whistle; he'd stomp and I'd
holler; he'd clang, boom, scream and I'd shake, rattle and pop. Even on
conventional instruments, there are a few tricks I'd be keen to steal off him.”
He also adds Patti Smith, Nick Cave “for Murder
Ballads alone,” Pokey LaFarge, Boxcar Joe Strouzer and The Midnight
Barbers.
Non-musical artistic inspirations include David Hockney,
Lucian Freud, Ai Weiwei (who’s “doing something bold,” though Overton fears it’ll
be over before he understands what it is).
As he puts it, when Overton
performs, he tries to tell the story of the evening: one song should follow the
other, from the themes to the lyrics to the melody. He likes to keep it simple,
and keep the audience on the same page—preferably sentence, word, breath.
As Overton tells it, the
greatest trick of the artist is to become immortal and then die. This artist in
particular could have quite the story.
His tunes are just a click
away at sharpnoir.tumblr.com.