"Wilkes’s musical style defies easy labels. It owes a little bit to the likes of Guy Clark, John Prine and Kris Kristofferson and a lot to no one you’ve ever heard before. Peppered with raunchy wit and piercing self-deprecation, his songs manage to be intensely personal and universal at the same time, filled with longing and laugh-out-loud one-liners. Even the saddest and sweetest of his songs will make you guffaw when you least expect it." - Rick Hynum
Thurston Euzema (“Tad”) Wilkes was weaned at a young age on storytelling songcraft in the golden age of singer-songwriters—Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot, Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmy Buffett, Paul Williams, Paul Simon, Kris Kristofferson, and others. His formative years into the 1980s then progressed through Van Halen, Run DMC, Black Flag, and ZZ Top before he delved below the crust of all of the above into the rabbit hole of their influences. At age 17, Wilkes channeled what he’d absorbed into the first crude original music of “Moon Pie Curtis.” Today, his catalog of original songs runs deep, with a unique point of view and often unexpected wordplay—delivered with a shit-eating grin.