There are many shortcuts to musical stardom, from "American Idol" to MySpace to YouTube.
Then there's Bill Toms' approach. He grabs his guitars and travels to any club, nightspot or watering hole that will have him. In the past year, he has ranged as far west as Nebraska, and eastward across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain and Italy.
All to see where his music fits.
"I've been studying a little bit about the life of Woody Guthrie," says Toms, who releases his new CD, "Spirits, Chaos, and a Troubadour Soul" on Saturday at Cefalo's in Carnegie. "I've been trying to figure out how music can represent my feelings and using my craft as a tool for expressing my ideas when it comes to social issues."
Toms, formerly of The Houserockers and currently helming his own band, Hard Rain, has concentrated on solo performances of late. He's studying the music of Guthrie, Brownie McGhee and Cisco Houston -- "connecting the dots," he says, between those troubadours and 21st-century life.
"I think (the concept of troubadours) has been lost," Toms says. "Especially in today's pop society, we want everything to be a hit record. We don't take it seriously anymore."
One of the themes of "Spirits, Chaos, and a Troubadour Soul" is Toms' connection to his family. There are songs about the quality of life ("There Was a Time") and a sterling cover of The Waterboys' "Fisherman's Blues."
But the centerpiece of the record is "Fourth of July," a song that has it roots in World War II. Toms' uncle, his father's only sibling, died in battle at the age of 19, and the musician says the reverberations of that incident affect him today.
"My father was in Germany when his brother was killed," he says. "And I'm aware of how that affected the way my father raised his children, and how I raise my children. And the song sort of snowballed from there by looking at what we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the news, they just throw numbers around. I was thinking about how it affects so much more than the immediate family, how it affects generations to come. So I wrote this song depicting a young man, just trying to put a face on it."
Another song, "It's Saturday Night Somewhere," is a true story from the road. Toms wrote it last year after a performance in Omaha, Neb.
"It was the first time I really picked up an acoustic guitar, got in my van and went out on the road by myself," he says. "It was scary, it was lonely, but it was liberating. It opened me up to a lot of things. I met a lot of people who influenced me, and I find myself more open to everybody's stories now."
Toms calls his solo sojourns the "most exciting thing I've ever done." And, while he's not likely to be playing major festivals or large concert halls in the near future, he's certain that he has a found a musical path that suits him.
"To me, playing all the time, connecting with an audience, is the basic idea of what music is all about," Toms says. "I've always believed that if you take the business away from music, you're still going to have somebody writing a song, playing guitar or singing on a street corner somewhere. That idea really appeals to me."
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