Philip Gibbs Biography

In the summer of 1996, Philip Gibbs found his sister's old three quarter sized nylon string guitar at the bottom of a hallway closet and started playing, continuing to do so every day since. After learning a few chords and then a few songs, soon Phil was writing songs of his own and playing them in coffee shops in his native Austin, Texas, starting in the now defunct Rio Grand Coffee Shop in the West Campus area of the University of Texas. Later, in the Spring of 1998, he boarded the S.S. Universe Explorer, a floating university that took him throughout South America, Africa and Asia.

When he got back to Texas, burning to play, Philip, along with friends Daniel Roark, Cuauhtemoc Sanchez, Jesse Schultz and Travis Landers, formed the band #34, an acoustic guitar based rock band that would play country songs about the Texas rain or reggae songs about trying to reach Zion. The band played around town at Mexican food restaurants, private parties and more than once at the legendary Steamboat, on Austin's historic 6th Street.

At the end of that Spring, three of the band members, including Phil, graduated from the University and so they all went their separate ways, and Philip went to New York City. He had some family there and he explored the artistic Mecca of the United States through the eyes of a songwriter singing in bars, coffee shops, subways and wherever people would listen. He met other songwriters such as Ernie Paiz, Mo Goldner, Rebecca Hall and James Thomas, who had a rock band called Third Man Out with drummer Joe Humel. While there, Philip met and played with several great musicians involved in the underground alternative country music scene drifting around Manhattan's Lower East Side, out to Williamsburg, Brooklyn and sometimes up to Queens. In winter he asked a few of them to record with him and in early Spring, he produced "Digging in the Bottom of Mines," an EP documenting these times, with Humel, Hall, violinist Rachel Birkin, bassist Andy Cotton and pedal steel player Bob Hoffner.

Finally, after a month long road trip stretching as far as Texas and Maine, Phil settled by the Cumberland River in Nashville in August of 2000 for a while.