Scott H. Biram

From Start to finish, Songwriter Scott H. Biram’s new album is a runaway freight car busting at the rivets with greasy, meat-grinder-raw country-blues-punk stompers and lonesome ballads. But The Dirty Old One Man Band—recently picked up by Chicago-based label Bloodshot—was just a hair shy of never existing.

Back in April 2003, Biram was rammed head-on by an 18-wheeler at 75 MPH, leaving him wheelchair bound with two broken legs, a broken foot, broken arm and a foot less of his lower intestine. But that sure as hell wasn’t going to stop him. Within a month he was back onstage at Austin, Texas’ Continental Club, rocking his hometown crowd with an I.V. jabbed in his arm.

“Ever since I had my wreck,” Says Biram from the road somewhere just outside Portland, Ore., “from being laid up like that, and worrying about how I had to cancel a tour—I wanted to make it to the clubs. I wanted to make sure they didn’t think I was dropping out of the picture. So while I was still laid up in bed and still having surgery, I started thinking about when I was going to be recovered, and I started booking a tour for that October. As soon as I was well I went on the road again. I mean, I played a few shows while I was in a wheelchair.”

After four months, Biram had battled back to his feet, though he had to use cane and crutch for a while after that. But the whole experience lit a fire under him.

“It kind of turned me into a workaholic because I couldn’t do anything for so long. I was anxious to be able to even wash my own dishes,” he laughs. “Ever since then, I haven’t been able to really stop. This old guy in this bar in San Marcos, Texas, one time told me, ‘Do something every day,’ and he was saying, you know, do something every day towards my music, and I took his advice, and now it’s like I do a hundred things a day. But I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing because I’m making myself exhausted.”

A huge deal of Biram’s energy, over the previous year, was spent cutting Dirty Old One Man Band. “For the first time ever,” he says, “I had some recording equipment that I could really take a long time and do some experimental stuff with, and just kind of try different things. So I did it all in my own house. My roommate happened to be gone for a month, so that helped. And then I just spread out all the amplifiers into all the different rooms. I recorded like one or two songs a day and then mixed them down all night, listened to them the next day and kept mixing down over and over until I got it just the way I wanted it to sound.”

After touring the U.S. earlier this year, lo-fi Iron Man Biram is now back home, playing a slew of Austin club gigs through June and into July.