Cole Quest & the City Pickers Homegrown

Since I was little I’ve been surrounded by, what I believe to be, some of the greats of American folk music. I’ve grown up with their words, their music, their ideologies, their perspectives being the catalysts that helped me to formulate my own opinions and thoughts. As I’m discovering who I am –both musically and otherwise-- I look to them as beacons with which to decide where to turn when faced with a choice, and I have a distinct feeling that they have travelled these paths before.

Homegrown is a collection of material that is sincerely close to me and where I come from. It’s the music of my roots –our roots. It features songs and words from my grandfather, Woody Guthrie, songs I learned from my uncle, Arlo Guthrie, and even a special delivery of a Woody quote read by Pete Seeger.

These songs tell the stories of those who came before us, and the lessons they’ve left behind. My original songs are much the same –reminders from my past self, reminding me of past choices and the person I aspire to be. The arrangements embrace the raw and natural sounds of acoustic guitars, banjo, harmonica, and Appalachian clogging laid out by past generations.

My hope is that the listener can hear these songs and take the feeling with them. Take the attitudes and the beacons and use them in their own ways. Find the feeling in music that brought them here in the first place, and bring it into the present with them.



As Woody said “[music] carries you back down the road you have traveled and makes you travel it again. Or it takes you back down the road somebody else has come, and you can look out across the world from the hill they’re standing on.”



- Cole Quest



About Cole Quest and the City Pickers:



"While he embraces much of Woody's legacy, Cole is very successfully forging his own path in music."

- John Platt, WFUV



"Keeps you coming back for more.”

- Tony Trischka