Brendan L. Spengler

There is something amazing about watching a musician evolve from square one. Shawn Reed from Wet Hair described it as the “without a net” stage of a musician’s career: They tend to be a little more timid, experimenting with voices, phrasings and nuances for the first time. Onstage you can watch them fail and succeed during what can be a spellbinding evolution of their talent. Douglas Kramer Nye had only been playing the guitar for three months when he wrote his first songs. And, over the course of three years, he learned more guitar chords, wrote more songs and made connections around the Iowa City music scene. His album, No Good Samaritan, is the record of these first steps.