Gregory Alan Isakov

Gregory Alan Isakov, a singer and songwriter based in Colorado, drew early inspiration from the working-class storytelling of Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen. His distinctive fusion of gritty folk and introspective Americana quickly attracted notice after he issued his first record, Rust Colored Stones, in 2003 on his own Suitcase Town Music imprint. Breakthrough arrived with the 2007 release That Sea, The Gambler, whose atmospheric folk and rural chamber-pop textures soon migrated to the screen in episodes of Girls, Rectify, and Californication. That cinematic sensibility prompted a 2016 collaboration with the Colorado Symphony, followed two years later by a Grammy nomination for Evening Machines. His sixth studio album, the Southwest-infused Appaloosa Bones, surfaced in 2023.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Isakov grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he began performing with a band at sixteen before moving to Colorado to concentrate on solo work. Subsequent releases included Songs for October in 2005, The Empty Northern Hemisphere in 2009, and its single “If I Go, I’m Goin,” which aired during the fourth season of the Showtime series Californication. The 2013 album The Weatherman yielded the tracks “Time Will Tell” and “Suitcase Full of Sparks,” the latter appearing on NBC’s The Blacklist.

In 2016 he unveiled Gregory Alan Isakov with the Colorado Symphony, an orchestral reimagining of earlier material. Evening Machines was tracked at his three-acre working farm, where he also cultivates and sells vegetable seeds; Tucker Martine mixed the twelve songs culled from forty originals, and the album reached listeners in October 2018, earning a nomination for Best Folk Album. After a five-year gap, Appaloosa Bones arrived in 2023, presenting a collection of intimate yet sonically layered folk songs shaped by journeys across the American Southwest.