Biography
This Frontier Needs Heroes is American singer-songwriter Bradley Lauretti. He came up in Brooklyn's DIY scene in the 2000s, spent years in Nashville, Miami and Jacksonville, Florida, and has lived in Barcelona since 2022. The songs are folk and Americana at the core, with folk-rock anthems, a psychedelic alt-country streak and plenty of straight storytelling, sometimes all in one song. He learned from John Prine, Billy Bragg, Kris Kristofferson and Townes Van Zandt that a song can be funny, angry and heartbroken at the same time.
His sixth album, Homage to Catalonia, closes a loose trilogy about living inside chaos. Real Job reported from the early Trump years. Go With the Flow tried to stay happy anyway. Homage to Catalonia is what happens after you leave, and find out your problems don't disappear. They just change shape. The title track borrows an old Catalan folk melody he heard pensioners singing at their Monday protest, the way Woody Guthrie hung new words on tunes people already knew. Salvador Dalí turns up as a spaghetti-western drifter in "Cadaqués Cowboy", and "Truck Driver" grew out of a night in an Alberta bar with a Trump-voting trucker he couldn't stop trying to understand. Half the record was cut in Barcelona at Slow Sound Studio Sants with Aaron Feder, the rest with friends in Nashville, Portland and San Francisco.
Over two decades and more than 1,000 shows across the US, Canada and Europe, he has played the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, Folk Alliance International, Nordic Folk Alliance, End of the Road (UK), Reeperbahn (Germany) and Live at Heart (Sweden), along with Incubate, Savannah Stopover, Athfest, Magnolia Festival, Hickey Fest, Gamble Rogers Folk Festival, Sing Out Loud, Clean Water Music Festival, Connection Festival, the Gram Parsons Guitar Pull and the Stetson Kennedy Foundation Literary Landmark Celebration. In Spain he has supported Sarah Lee Guthrie, Johnny Irion, Scarlet Rivera and Ian Dunlop, and played in the band behind them. "South Dakota" was a finalist in the 2020 Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at MerleFest, and he won the Artsville Songwriting Contest.
Off stage, he founded the Stetson Kennedy Songwriter Residency in Florida, on the land where Woody Guthrie wrote more than 80 songs, and Americana Barcelona, a concert series running since 2022.
Albums: This Frontier Needs Heroes · The Future · Hooky · Real Job · Go With the Flow · Homage to Catalonia