Shane Jackman

It has been a long road for the critically acclaimed songwriter and guitarist who left his native Salt Lake City at a young age to pursue his career as a singer/songwriter on the East Coast. With his wife and young baby, Jackman tended polo horses and lived in a hay loft to make ends meet while getting his start in front of discriminating East Coast coffee house crowds. Before long, Jackman's reputation as an insightful songwriter and engaging performer earned him gigs with artists like Michael Martin Murphy, Peter, Paul and Mary, Shawn Colvin, Marty Stewart, the Mavericks, Pete Seeger, and Howard Jones. With half-a-million miles and over a thousand concerts in the rear view mirror, Shane Jackman took a break from his breakneck touring schedule to settle with his young family in Springville, UT. In the late '90s, Salt Lake City-based Highway Records snatched up the talented performer with a record deal that allowed Jackman the freedom to stay home with his family yet still record and perform the music he loves. Still tightly connected with the national folk singer/songwriter scene, he is often called on to represent Utah and the West on the national stage. In 1999, Jackman was invited along with three other Utah songwriters to perform on a special stage at the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival in Kerrville, TX. A year later, he invited Kristen DeWitt and Michael Lille, two other nationally known folk artists, to join him as he recorded Equilibrium, his first effort for Highway. Michael Martin Murphy said "As Americans, we all want to understand who we are now, and we have some important choices...We can listen to the empty, hollow voice offered by Wall Street controlled media barons, which come to us disguised as ‘alternative,' or we can discover that there are song-poets like Shane Jackman who struggle to find the real soul of America as life is really lived...and his music will haunt you because it is poetry...and his image is shaped by that poetry. Poetry shaped by image is useless, but image shaped by poetry is priceless." The Gavin Report reviewed him as "A pure delight...Jackman has no problem distinguishing himself as one of the better entities of the singer/songwriter world." And Acoustic Guitar Magazine said "Jackman presents material that is substantive, soulful and artfully phrased...He has the ability to shift from songs of grim import to a jazzy fishin' tune, from vulnerability to a gutsy rendition of the outlaw on the run."