Thomas Anderson | |
Birth Place: | Oklahoma |
Origin: | Austin, Texas |
Genre: | Rock music |
Years Active: | 1989–present |
Label: | Out There, Blue Million Miles, Red River, Dutch East India Trading |
Thomas Anderson is an American singer-songwriter.[1] [2]
Anderson was born in Miami, Oklahoma.[3] [4] [5] He graduated from Oklahoma State University–Stillwater in 1981 with an English degree.[3] [5] [6]
Anderson recorded his debut album, Alright, It was Frank... and He's Risen From the Dead and Gone Off With His Truck, in Norman, Oklahoma in the late 1980s.[6] The album was released in 1989,[7] originally on vinyl on the Out There label.[8] He moved to Austin, Texas in 1992[9] but returned to Oklahoma some years later. In 1993, Alright, It Was Frank... was re-released on CD by the Dutch East India Trading label.[8]
His second album, Blues for the Flying Dutchman, was originally released by a small German label before being picked up by Dutch East India.[6] His third album, Moon Going Down, was released on the Marilyn label, which has been described as "slightly higher profile" than the labels he released his previous albums on.[7] In 1998, he released Bolide, a seven-track mini-album, on Red River Records.[10] In 2003, Anderson released another album, Norman, Oklahoma, also on Red River Records.[4] In 2012, he released The Moon in Transit, a collection of 12 four-track recordings of previously unreleased songs taken from his 13-year archives, on the Out There label.[11] He followed this the following year with another compilation album drawn from these archives, titled On Becoming Human.[11] [12]
In 1996, Tulsa World wrote that Anderson was "one of the most critically lauded yet efficiently obscure songwriters of the last decade."[7] Rolling Stone reviewed "Blues for the Flying Dutchman" favorably, giving it three and a half stars. The magazine said that the album "should find a place with everyone who believes that rock 'n' roll can still reflect and interpret the world in an original way - from the margins."[6] Robert Christgau has also given Anderson's albums multiple A grades.[9]