Outsider Southern Eccentric Troubadour Andy Dixon Debuts First Single 'Barking at Shadows' Under Band Gumshoe

The music of Athens GA's Gumshoe is an ever-changing structure built on the foundation of frontman Andy Dixon's "weirdo-as-Everyman lyrics" (Flagpole Magazine).

Formed in 2011, the band released its debut album The Bad Route Down in 2014, and was nominated for an Athens Music Award in the Americana category the following year. Since then, they've released two Christmas singles - including last year's anti-Trump anthem "Santa, Lock up Trump."

With the addition of free jazz drummer John Norris in late 2014, Gumshoe took on a sharper edge, pumping out "lean, darkly evocative rock songs with vivid imagery" (Flagpole). Bassist Jef Whatley came on board in 2017, rounding out the current trio formation.

Dixon honed his writing with short fiction and long poetry, along with a half decade as a sports journalist at newspapers from south Georgia to Philadelphia. He stumbled into music by making several albums of sound collage and experimental electronic under the name monkE. At age 28, he picked up a friend's guitar and began to put words and music together.

Listen to "Barking at Shadows" here:

Informed by his compulsive reading of crime noir novels, his extended stays in Zen monasteries, and a habit of hiking in the Georgia woods that dates back to his days as an Eagle Scout, Dixon's lyrics cover a "schizophrenic landscape so full of split personality that Tom Waits seems reasonable in comparison" (Flagpole). Topics range from questioning one's own sanity amid dizzying celestial math, to tragic, drugged-up rural misadventures and a woman whose dreams are not-unpleasantly frequented by the ghost of the scoundrel Richard Nixon.