Emerson Dameron
Strangeness as Strategy
I write one-sheet artist bios—mostly for musicians—designed to cut through noise, sidestep convention, and give writers, bookers, and gatekeepers something they actually want to engage with.
I've been writing about music for money since I was 16, with two stints as a college radio music director and decades inside the machinery of labels, publicity firms, and arts marketing. I understand how artists think, how press thinks, and where those two perspectives fail to meet.
My job is to close that gap without sanding off what makes the artist strange, volatile, or impossible to summarize.
I don't believe in neutral copy, genre mad-libs, or biographies that read like committee documents. The best artist bios are acts of translation and controlled misdirection: they establish lineage without flattening it, context without cliché, mystery without bullshit.
I've written bios for emerging artists and for projects operating at the highest levels of cultural attention. In at least one case, my words escaped the page entirely and became a music video starring Dennis Hopper.
I'm comfortable shaping narrative, withholding information, and bending the frame—because attention is never earned by obedience, and differentiation never comes from following instructions too closely.
This is bespoke work. I don't use templates, intake forms, or "brand voice" worksheets. I read, listen, obsess, and interrogate until the artist's internal logic clicks into focus—then I write something that makes journalists steal lines, managers forward PDFs, and artists feel uncomfortably seen.
If you're frustrated by polite invisibility, allergic to boilerplate, and interested in going around industry conventions rather than through them, this works. If not, there are safer options.