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"Allen takes no prisoners, pulls no punches." —ROLLING STONE

Pedal Steal is another installment in Sugar Hill’s plan to restore all of maverick renaissance man Terry Allen’s recordings to print again. It’s loosely based on an actual steel guitar player who wandered Texas and New Mexico in the late 60s-early 70s, one of the first to use the instrument for rock and roll.

From album liners by author Dagoberto Gilb:

In the Pedal Steal … you hear guitar strings being tightened into tune, slowly, the crickets in your ear on this dark night outdoors. Boots step toward you. They get steady closer. Guitar string wind. Somebody’s quick practicing rock’n’roll drums until the rhythm changes, a slower, deeper Indian beat. The highway fizz interrupts. A clavinova chimes wind and a steel guitar whines and drawls country syllables but the organ sound goes Mexican, mariachi trumpets and a McDonald’s commercial interfere. A Navajo chant is closer than a TV show on in the background at a motel and the rock drummer is back, better now, grown, and a young guitar does an acid rock squeal, bend, warp, and it all shifts Indian, like drinking tequila, and there is thunder, and sax reeds, "A Sentimental Journey," settle the air: This is the beginning. …

Few if any musicians epitomize the notion of artist as fully as Terry Allen. A creator within music visual arts, drama, film, video, radio and the written word, Allen is a genuine multidisciplinary artistic force whose modes of expression are only limited by his boundless imagination. He is, as one of his friends aptly put it, a chicken-fried renaissance man.

A Sugar Hill recording artist since his 1998 album Human Remains, Allen previously released his music on his own Fate Records label, all of which is being reissued on Sugar Hill. It's a collection recorded everywhere from Lubbock and Austin, Texas to Bangkok, Thailand that has marked him as one of the most distinctive talents working within the greater realms of country music. Over the course of 11 albums, Allen has recorded with the likes of David Byrne, Lucinda Williams, Guy Clark and Marcia Ball as well as most everyone who is anyone within the fertile Austin and Lubbock music scenes. Along the way, he has had songs recorded by Little Feat, Bobby Bare and Robert Earl Keen and featured in the Byrne film True Stories along with composing music for other film soundtracks and theater and dance pieces.

Allen is also a noted contemporary visual artist whose work includes painting, sculpture, installations, prints and video works as well as various combinations thereof and more. He has won numerous awards and honors as well as Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and his work has been shown at major institutions across America and Europe. Allen's art can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as other public and private collections. He has written dramatic pieces for radio, and a collection of Allen's art, prose, poetry and drama, Dugout, was published by the University of Texas Press. And, yes, he does find time to sleep as well.

During the course of his musical career, Allen has risen from a cult and critical favorite to being a popular live performer in his native Texas as well as across North America and in Europe. In all of his creative endeavors, no matter what the medium, he remains, as the L.A. Weekly proclaims, “a great storyteller.”

Terry and Jo Harvey Allen live in Santa Fe, and are the parents of Bukka and Bale Allen, who are, respectively, a musician and an artist, both based in Austin. And Allen himself continues to dedicate his muse to multidisciplinary creative pursuits.

These days, artistry seems so regimented that if you're going to do something, you have to do one thing, or you have to be in a slot, or it has to be this or has to be that, Allen observes. And it's really alien to our life form because we have at least five senses that are all operating at once. Why not use them?