Don't miss the 4th annual Wyoming Plays the WYO on Saturday, May 7 @ 7:30pm with Doug Andrews and featuring Jalan Crossland. Be the first of your friends to buy tickets to the after party and add your name to the list. $20 with the purchase of a concert ticket gets you in with Jalan, Doug, a cash bar, free beer and light hors d'oeuvres from Oliver's. Contact the WYO Theater box office at 307.672.9084 for tickets to both events.

Jalan Crossland

Raised in a small Wyoming town, Jalan Crossland is one of a very few "alt country" artists his age who still claims the "country" as home. Maybe this explains the lyrical, "truth is stranger than fiction" wobble to his songs about 21st century rural life. Live and on recordings he adds dazzling guitar and banjo fingerpicking to his kanky tales of hobos, tires, "mobile homes", strippers, motorcycles, trucks, cars, vice presidents and methamphetamines ("Drugs are bad" says Jalan).

Jalan has been touring both solo and with a band for ten years, but his musical upbringing is of course longer, and more sordid. Though the guitar spends a lot of time in Jalan's hands these days, the first stringed entity that caught his young eye and ear was the banjo, his uncle Dan figuring prominently in this. Despite this banjo affliction, Jalan somehow survived his Wyoming Teenage Boy Instinct for Self-Destruction well enough, to emerge in his twenties playing electric guitar for money on the road. "All big hair, playing a whammy-bar Ibanez Firebird copy, in Iron Maiden wannabe bands."

But the "country" was and is always with him. Later Jalan's metal phase gave way, to touring with honky-tonk country bands as a hired gun. He moved to solo status in the late 1900s, which is also when he began crafting his strange, new-old-timey tales of sagebrush and asphalt. While building his reputation as a solo artist, Jalan spent a lot of time at home in Tensleep, Wyoming (pop. 300) either by the woodstove or on the porch, picking and picking and picking, becoming a roots music virtuoso. True to his slacker past, Jalan managed a mere second place finish in the 1997 Winfield National Guitar Fingerpicking competition.

As of fall 2007 Jalan has a steadily performing band and 3 cds: Poorboy Shanty, Moonshiner, and Trailer Park Fire & Other Tragedies. He hit the road in early 2008 for his first national dates with the Jalan Crossland Band, a Rocky Mountain regional favorite since forming in late 2005.

Doug Andrews

Austin based, international singer-songwriter, Doug Andrews, creates an intimate, expansive, story-telling experience delivered with a Folk/Americana base coat (echoing his native Wyoming), polished by a smooth, blues lacquer. Rooted in the soul, reflected in humanity, connecting through the tunesmith vein, Andrews has sponged the lessons left by those before him and continues to expand in depth and breadth himself.

"The Weight of Dreams" (from debut album, Absaraka Runoff) shineís a light on Dougís continual integration of lifeís lessons. Giving and receiving life from song as momentum gains, he stretches his neck and spreads his wings from WY through the world as a round-trip courier of human experience.

Sponsors: Frank & Georgia Boley with additional donations from Chuck & Jeannie Hutton, Sheridan Anesthesia Associates