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Lance Austin was born to entertain. He is quick and witty with his humor, and his voice has the ability to captivate and hypnotize an audience without warning. The moment Austin opens his mouth, something unexplainable fills the air. One moment you are happily engaged in your book; the next, you find yourself reading the same sentence over and over until you realize something intangible has pulled you away from your world of words. Combined with his ability to effortlessly manipulate tone, pitch, and volume, it is the intangible element tickling the unconscious that makes this 23 year-old singer/songwriter/guitarist from Burlington, Vermont truly original.

At the age of 15, Austin divided his extracurricular time between musical theater, select choruses, and varsity hockey. The soundtrack of his life included Hendrix, Clapton, The Allman Brothers, The Beatles, Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, Little Feat, The Jackson 5, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Temptations, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others. With three years of experience playing the guitar, Austin teamed up with two good friends and his younger brother to form Mare Nubium, which would survive until his graduation in 2000. The band dominated the school’s weekly coffeehouses and eventually worked its way into the local Burlington scene, sharing the stage with some of the most successful bands in the area. Austin’s departure for Skidmore College inspired the band to professionally record a demo CD. The four songs on the album capture some of Austin’s best songwriting and creativity; they reveal, not only the impact of his influences, but, more importantly, his ability to create original music that captivates with the intangible.

During his four years of college, Austin continued to develop his skills as a singer/performer with The Skidmore Dynamics, a highly selective co-ed a cappella group. In 2002, the group won the International Competition of Collegiate A Cappella for New England/Central Canada, and later placed among the top six groups in North America with a final performance at Lincoln Center in New York City. In his final semesters with the group, Austin spent many hours at Charles Eller Studios in Charlotte, VT producing the “Dyno’s” new album. His knack for vision and creativity effectively transformed the 17 voices into a sound nobody in the group had imagined possible. This brief exposure to the world of music production excited and inspired his solo career; Austin had new skills and he brought them home to his bedroom, which was being rapidly overtaken by studio equipment.

Recently, Austin has been compared to Jason Mraz and John Mayer, but with more of the “edge” found in the music of Gavin DeGraw and Maroon 5. His melodies are catchy and memorable; his lyrics consist of words that are typically straightforward but not simplistic. In “Forever” he weaves images that explore the intricacies of time with a struggle to live in the moment. “Everyone was asking me what I was going to do after college, where I was going to work,” Austin comments, “essentially, they wanted to know who I was going to be. At the time, I was concerned with the ‘here and now’ as they say. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any sort of plan, it was just that I didn’t want to talk about it constantly, because every time I thought about my supposed future as a series of deadlines, I found that it took something away from the moment I was in.” Currently, Lance Austin is a resident of Burlington, Vermont and is carving a niche for himself as a one-of-a-kind singer/songwriter with an impressive voice and a power to captivate in a way that is entirely unexplainable.