Mt. Egypt
Perspectives (Record Collection)

Travis Graves is the singer/songwriter/frontman/forest ranger for Mt. Egypt, a band of honesty, sensitivity, romance and greatness that nods its musical head in the direction of The Flaming Lips, Willie Nelson, The Walkmen, Cat Power, Will Oldham, James Mercer, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.

Born in Virginia in 1978, Travis spent the bulk of his childhood in California and Washington, eventually hitting the road and landing in the Bay Area where he pursued his skateboarding dreams. He quickly became a sponsored rider and proceeded to blow minds with his expressive, freewheelin' approach to skateboarding. Along the way Travis found solace in strumming guitars and singing songs, a kind of cathartic, excretion of the soul that's about laying your feelings on the table uncensored.

He moved to London, then to New York. He recorded songs into a 4-track. He hooked up with a secret information society dedicated to curiosity, adventure, The Moment. He surfed and skated. He saw metaphor in the impermanent flow of the ocean and symbolism in the eternal cracks of the sidewalk. He fell in love at least once per day. He stayed up all night writing, picking, flooding. He turned it all into Battening The Hatches (2003), a debut album writhing in depth, truth and the kind of shit that gets women salivating and macho men silently admiring its exposure and vulnerability.

Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips turned on to him, took him on the road and introduced young Travis to a higher, more peopled altitude. Travis' ollies reached new heights and so did his music. Then came that bearded, headbanded, wizened country boy known as Willie Nelson, who knows a good tune when he hears it, and also brought Travis on the road as his opening act.
Give a switched-on minstrel a city block and he’ll get every porch dweller tapping their toes. Give him an entire country and he'll leave a song on everyone's lips, which is exactly what Travis did -- traveling the US in a van, spreading pollen, converting the unconverted. Again drawing from experience -- this time a much deeper well of triumph and tragedy, ball rooms and smelly bordellos -- he laid down Perspectives in 2005.

Produced by Tony Berg (Aimee Mann, X, Kate Earl), Perspectives is an album of evocative grooves, sensitive lyrics and echoes of greatness.

back to top