Tom Alfera

Here you will find music made by me, Tom Alfera, who is much like the songs: out of the cave and into the light, for better AND for worse. I’ll take whatever comes my way because it sure as heck beats the alternative.

I was born into a Tylenol-tampered-with-world, a world with super-fund environmental disaster sites and savage capitalism. I was born to people who were broken by too much use and disappointment.  So I became a refugee, taken in by a radio at night.  AM radio and the early days of FM: Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, The Beach Boys, Guy Clark, Willie Nelson, Joni Mitchell, Chrissie Hynde, Springsteen, CSN, Paul Simon and all those one-hit-wonder-types took me places, safer places, scary places, better places.  And they put pictures in my head.  Songwriters were my peculiar people.

My virtual world in the radio was better than the real world of people.  Then I discovered nature and those who commune with it.  I found my other peculiar people, the people of the woods.  Emerson, Dickinson, Thoreau, Frost, and my dear friends Mary Oliver and Walt Whitman.  I found myself footing it with these free spirits who rejected this so-called civilization, that conspiracy of society designed to take away the “manhood of its members.”  Emerson said, “In the woods we return to reason and faith…nothing can befall me which nature cannot repair.”  Word!

And so here is Walt Whitman and my weathered dreams; here is Appalachia, the Bear Republic, and a thousand places in between and along the way; here is a wearied wanderlust and innocent wonder; here is a collection of experiences and a cast of characters that are heartbroken, yet hopeful.  Both me and these songs are radio refugees in our own way; and it (my life and these songs) is a celebration of the poor results of all.