Jonathan Pointer is a son of Missouri. Raised and educated by Methodists, his early years were spent "drawing pictures, playing the trombone and making stuff up." He has been a soda-jerk and a dog-catcher, pumped gas and delivered pizzas. He has sold everything from shoes to meat on a spiritual quest that has taken him from state run mental facilities to Carnegie Hall.

It is from such life experiences that Pointer draws the frequently off-centered, always provocative and often surprisingly touching stories that are his music. The world he has created includes a town where all the babies smoke and a community of strychnine-drinking snake handlers. It is a world of burning scarecrows, innocent men and yard sales; of bar-room poets, paranoid lovers, and tattooed women.

Pointer's world view, he says "is hardly the utopian legacy our parents had in mind." Still, it is not darkness that accentuates his work, but rather the insight his Iyrics yield, often using wry humor to lighten the burden of deeper meaning. While publicly taking full credit for everything, he privately gives co-writing credit to "Stan" -- a border collie whom he lovingly describes as "me without thumbs."

If his songs are the sum of his experiences, he is also a product of influence -- shaped by artists that include Randy Newman, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and Richard Thompson. With such a diverse collection of mentors, it is no surprise Pointer's music is an eclectic mix of country, jazz, folk and rock and has been embraced in New York clubs that include Café Sin-é, The Bitter End and C.B.'s Gallery.

Now, with the creation of the CD "scarecrows burn," an artist's world is revealed to a larger world, where all of us see things, but few illustrate life as well as Pointer.

-- John Hughes, Orange County Register, Orange County, CA