Stuart Davis

Stuart Davis (born January 11, 1971) is an American contemporary musician and songwriter.

Stuart Evan Davis was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1971, the youngest of three brothers.

His family moved to Lakeville, Minnesota when he was a young boy, and he was formally introduced to music when his father got him a guitar and taught him three chords.

By the time he had graduated high school he'd recorded his first album and was soon playing shows around Minnesota.

Early influences include: Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, XTC, and Bob Dylan.

The first two albums in the Stuart Davis catalogue, Idiot Express and Big Energy Dream, are social and romantic critiques featuring simple acoustic guitar progressions and minimal instrumentation characteristic of folk music.

His third release, Self-Untitled, received airplay on some alternative and public stations with the songs "Universe Communion" and "Only Changing Drugs".

With his fourth album, Nomen Est Numen, Davis shed his folk roots.

The music featured driving bass lines, electric guitars, and richer vocal harmonies characteristic of alternative/pop, and lyrically it was more intellectual and subversive.

Between Nomen Est Numen and his fifth album, Kid Mystic, two important events happened to Davis.

First, he was introduced to Zen Buddhism by his drummer Dave King, and became a practitioner of zazen, or sitting meditation.

The second was his discovery of the book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, by Ken Wilber.

Their influence would soon send Davis on an entirely new trajectory.

As the title implies, on Kid Mystic Davis begins to explore some ethereal territory.

The pace and structure of the songs are much different, and the lyrics are more image-conscious and laced with metaphor.

Death and dying play a major role, implicitly or explicitly, on a majority of the tracks, and instead of playing as simply a collection of songs, it is more a unitive work.

The tagline of his subsequent studio album, Bright Apocalypse, is "13 Songs About God", and uses some of the same structural and thematic material.

The thirteen songs construct a sort of dialogue with the divine; much of the album is sung in second person, and in several of the songs the divine speaks back in whispers.

His eponymous seventh album, popularly known as the Silver Album or Silver/Naked, for its cover art featuring a nude Davis adorned in silver paint, is built around a trilogy of songs that close the album called "Dive", "Swim", and "Drown".

They were inspired by the book Grace and Grit, another work by Ken Wilber, and "tell the story of a soul going back home."

The album also contains the song "Ladder", which is featured as the bumper music on Wilber's audio program Kosmic Consciousness.

He has been performing throughout the United States and Europe since 1993.

Davis regularly works with music producer Alex Gibson, who produced his last five studio albums.

Beginning in 2003, Davis began working with Alex Gibson, who produced that year's Bell.

Gibson was able to procure the services of world-renowned drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. (Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon), and Davis's affiliation with Gibson would continue to give him access to some of the most accomplished session musicians in the industry.

Bell was followed by ¿What, a radical sonic departure in the Davis discography, which features performance poetry by Saul Williams on "April Showers, April Tears", beat-boxing on "Easter", house-influenced synth bass lines on "Dirty Purity", dissonant sampled loops on "Voodoo Dolls", and the spare, haiku-like "Glass".

¿What is filled with haunting effects and vocals throughout, and features songs mostly composed of sampled loops and sequenced rhythms.

He expressed the wish to make a video with actress Parker Posey for his song "Parker Posey", which tells the story about a condescending director pitching a movie role to Posey that is beneath her ability, so he can break her into the upper echelon of Hollywood A-list actresses.

His next album, Something Simple, leads off with the single "Already Free", which was featured as the end theme of the Showtime series I Can't Believe I’m Still Single, and was also used in the movie Drillbit Taylor.

A precursor to the HDNet series "Sex, God, Rock 'n Roll" existed in the form of a 12-part web series, The Stuart Davis Show (2007), select episodes of which were co-written with Steven Brill.

Ken Wilber has called Davis "the finest singer/songwriter of his generation".

His single Already Free (2008) was featured as the end theme of the Showtime series I Can't Believe I'm Still Single, and was also used in the feature film Drillbit Taylor.

It peaked at 154 on the Billboard singles chart in 2008.

Davis worked with a new roster of musicians for this project, including Wendy Melvoin on guitar, Ed Kowalczyk on backing vocals, and Sean Hurley (John Mayer, Pitbull) on bass.

Hurley previously contributed on ¿What.

Joe Viglione noted the influence of Al Green and Elvis Costello on Something Simple and wrote that the song "Deity Freak" "is as infectious as it gets."

He wrote that Something Simple "demands a number of spins before it reveals itself and some of the mystery still remains, which is the kind of intangible quality usually indicating that something special is going on."

After taking a few years off from music to concentrate on his television and screenwriting projects, Davis went back into the studio with a new band to record Music For Mortals.

In 2009, TV channel HDNet broadcast the first six-episode season of "Sex, God, Rock 'n Roll", a comedy sketch show written, directed, and hosted by Davis; a second season with Davis and co-host Kandyse McClure began airing in 2012.

Davis is a contributing member of philosopher Ken Wilber's Integral Institute, and appears as a fictionalized character in Wilber's novel Boomeritis.