Biography
Dito Montiel resists any notion of himself as someone who merely dabbles. Although he has produced acclaimed books and helmed the prize-winning feature A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, songwriting remains his central pursuit. In a press statement he explained: "The book was simply a song on paper. The movie is a big one on a screen, and the ones on my album happen to have some music mixed in." Support for that position rests on firmer ground than similar claims from other multi-disciplinary artists. Threads of his musical explorations run throughout the story of A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, his account of a tough Queens, NY, upbringing that first appeared as a 2003 memoir and later earned the 2006 Sundance award for best director as a film. Born to a volatile Nicaraguan typewriter mechanic who once boxed Sugar Ray Robinson and the mechanic’s enduring Irish-American spouse, Montiel entered his initial punk outfit, Major Conflict, at thirteen in 1983. Geffen Records later signed Gutterboy, the next punk group he led, in 1989. Although that early recording path collapsed before Gutterboy reached a broad audience, Montiel continued composing songs without pause. Describing the film and his books—including the 2007 novel Eddie Krumble Is the Clapper—as songs may overextend the idea, yet he accumulated a substantial catalog of conventional tracks while establishing himself as an author, screenwriter, and director. Fifteen of those tracks appear on the indie-rock album Dito Montiel, whose material will evoke the eccentric figures from Montiel’s past for anyone already acquainted with them through A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.
Albums