Roger Lienke is an Oklahoma City-based musical refugee of the Minneapolis suburbs. He has been around the proverbial block a time or two. Done some things. Gotten knocked about some. Gotten up. Gotten older. Gotten young again. He lives close to the heart of the matter and writes about it. He’s for real and he cares. His songs are a bringing together; they take you somewhere.

His voice mixes a northern edge with warm tones of the Oklahoma earth. Influences infuse his music from his ancestors (folk, jazz, orchestral, band and theater music) and he has blended them into a distinctive amalgam of Americana music that pops, rocks, soothes and challenges. With a background of British invasion-inspired, American pop (with contributions from rhythm and blues, reggae, country, soul, psychedelic rock, and film music) Lienke brings a storyteller’s sensibility to everything he writes, a process that began when he was eight years old.

The guitar is his main instrument but not his only one. He plays the piano and French horn (taught early on by his father) and lends his hands to the bass and drums when called for. His arrangements are driven by an approach to rhythm he calls the “topbeat”. In the tonality of his music, there is history, there is possibility, and there is now. It calls you in. It asks you to let go of outworn musical fixations, to inhabit an alternative world and to participate.

Longtime collaborator with his brothers in performance and on record, Lienke has since launched a solo career that includes composing for different mediums (records, radio, theater, television and films), performing (alone and with friends) and directing select musical projects. His latest CD on Blue Chip Records is Snake in the Grass. Realistic about but undaunted by some of the obstacles intrinsic to the business of making music, Lienke states: