Trevor Sensor is a young man with an old soul. He’s also a young man who possesses a voracious sense of curiosity, which is being amply fed as he travels the country; armed with his trusty guitar Sensor is providing opening support for folk rock band The Staves on a tour which will bring him to play his first show ever in Nashville at The High Watt on June 24th.
“I’ve been to Nashville before; I ended up in a honky tonk and I was mystified. The United States is so big and every state is so different. Even regions in states have they’re unique characteristics. It’s a giant multi-cultural experience, and when you move around in it, you see how we’re all so different, but our society is able to function as a whole,” Sensor explains.
“The South is a mystical region to me, it’s a different world,” adds the Illinois native. “It’s the one sector of the country that’s not overly dominated by secularism, there’s a religious tone that’s still prevalent. Secularism kills all the magic in the world, but mysterious things can still happen in the South. I like it because things are left up to faith, or not knowing, there’s an allowance to not know everything or have control over everything.”
“To me, living in the South has to be more than these hedonistic concepts of solo cups and drinking beer all the time. I hate the stereotypes,” he adds. “There’s an irony to it—people stick their noses in the air and declare how accepting and enlightened they are, and they’ll turn around and judge. If you are truly celebrating and understanding people’s individuality, you can’t write off a whole population of people as ignorant just because they speak differently than you. It irks me,” he declares. “I like talking to people from different areas of our country to try to understand them, because it helps me understand our country as a whole better.” Right on Trevor Sensor. Right on.
The young midwesterner hails from a blue collar town, but he says there’s an ugliness beneath the nice exterior. “It inspires what I do, my songs generally embody that kind of tension and contrast,” he says of his punk rock fare presented in a folk-like package, delivered in his uniquely gritty growl. Sensor sings of love, and injustice. And Jesus ending up in a bar. “Yeah, I’m not sure how Jesus ended up in a bar,” he says of his song, “Texas Girls and Jesus Christ”, from his recently-released EP via label Jajaguwar with the same title.
Sensor has a deep respect for the art of songwriting, a fact which translates clearly in the music he creates. “I view music in an abstract way. When I write a song, I think about it as I’m taking up three minutes of someone’s time, and in that three minutes, I want to relate to the human condition somehow,” he says. “Writing is really special to me; I’ll get an idea and 30 minutes later it will be a song. It feels like I’m channeling something.”
The traveling troubadour will finish his tour at the end of June, so what’s next for him? “There may or may not be stuff in the pipeline. I’ve only put out an EP and a single, so the assumption is that there’s more on the way, right?” he laughs. I sure do hope so.
For information about the show: http://www.ticketweb.com/t3/sale/SaleEventDetail?dispatch=loadSelectionData&eventId=6507935&pl=mercylounge
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