Hi! My name is Tad Dreis. I’m a singer-songwriter based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and I play guitar and harmonica and travel around the country playing at colleges and other venues. When I’m not on the road, I teach music lessons.
My music can generally be categorized as folk-pop. It’s catchy stuff with smart lyrics, heart, and a sense of humor. I lean toward acoustic instruments, but I’m not ruling out a synth-pop album yet, either.
In September of 2009, I released my fourth CD, titled “The Reluctant Hook (and the day that caught it),” and I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve done, both from a writing and a production perspective.
Many of the songs on The Reluctant Hook tell stories, and it features the most collaboration of any record I’ve done. I recorded it with my touring band, brought in some specials guests on cello, electric guitar, and keyboard, and then did additional work on my own for most of a summer at Arbor Ridge Studios, with my co-producer Jeff Crawford.
In other years, I recorded everything myself in my home studio and played most of the instruments – “Play To Remember” came out in 2005, “Solitaire For Two” was in 2003, and “Yours Asleep” kicked things off in 2001. The songs are up on the Music page and you can order the discs from my CD Baby store.
I love to perform live, so I travel quite a bit and perform maybe seventy to a hundred shows a year. Most of the time, it’s just me on vocals, guitar, and harmonica. I also do shows with a backup band when I’m in North Carolina. If you’d like to know when I’m playing near you, sign up for the email list or subscribe to my Shows RSS Feed.
As a further step into cyberspace, I’ve begun doing occasional live webcast shows in my home. It’s kinda neat – you can watch me play live from anywhere in the world, and there’s a chat window where you can basically IM with everybody watching the show, make requests, and applaud and whistle virtually. It would probably be smart for me to do this on more of a regular basis, but for now, I’ll just make announcements when I’m doing one and add it to my calendar. You can watch past shows archived at my Ustream page.
