"A winning match! Fred and Matt are two of the best singer-songwriters around, and together they're even more dynamic and compelling." Lisa Grey, leading radio consultant

During the last five years both Fred Gillen Jr. and Matt Turk have engaged audiences and refined their art in the Hudson Valley's fertile singer-songwriter scene north of New York City. On numerous occasions the two performers shared the stage and eventually became close friends. After months of rehearsals, several impressive gigs around New England and world-wide notice in an Associated Press article that featured the duo auditioning for the Metropolitan Transit Authority in Manhattan, the news is finally out: Gillen & Turk are twisting their talent together into something new and exciting.

"There's so much energy and fun playing with Fred, it's like I'm starting out all over again," says Turk. Augmented by drummer Andy LaDue and multi-instrumentalist Steve Kirkman from Hope Machine, the Woody Guthrie tribute band, Gillen & Turk present both their acoustic and electric repertoire in a fashion that bends toward the recognizable folk-rock genre without losing any respective idiosyncrasies. Harmonies abound, along with singing that's tough, sincere, full of heart and soul. Guitars are front and center. There is also some spirited playing of the washboard and mandolin. Gillen concurs: "This is the kind of 'meeting of the muses' I've always hoped and waited for."

Gillen's chrome-rimmed specs give him a downtown Manhattan image, but he loves them for their durability through the bumpy, this-way and that-way nature of his musical career. A Hudson Valley native, he took up the electric bass guitar first and landed in a prog-rock outfit before ending up in the Rain Deputies, one of New York's top bands in the early-1990s. Always a voracious reader, Gillen's literary interests became manifested in songwriting, and by the time he cut his first solo CD, Intentions as Big as the Sky, in 1997, his ability to stir listeners with the power of his words and performances was obvious. The album's lead track, "Face of Love," inspired by the AIDS-related death of his foster sister, became a touchstone hit on the folk circuit, and from this elegiac song Gillen's reputation grew.