Raised in a small Wyoming town, Jalan Crossland is one of a very few “alt country” artists his age who still claims the “country” as home. Maybe this explains the lyrical, 'truth is stranger than fiction' wobble to his songs about 21st century rural life. Live and on recordings he adds dazzling guitar and banjo fingerpicking to his kanky tales of hobos, tires, “mobile homes”, strippers, motorcycles, trucks, cars, vice presidents and methamphetamines (“Drugs are bad” says Jalan).

Jalan has been touring both solo and with a band for ten years, but his musical upbringing is of course longer, and more sordid. Though the guitar spends a lot of time in Jalan's hands these days, the first stringed entity that caught his young eye and ear was the banjo, his uncle Dan figuring prominently in this. Despite this banjo affliction, Jalan somehow survived his Wyoming Teenage Boy Instinct for Self-Destruction well enough, to emerge in his twenties playing electric guitar for money on the road. All big hair playing a whammy-bar Ibanez Firebird copy, in Iron Maiden wannabe bands."

But the 'country' was and is always with him. Later Jalan's metal phase gave way, to touring with honky-tonk country bands as a hired gun. He moved to solo status in the late 1900s, which is also when he began crafting his strange, new-old-timey tales of sagebrush and asphalt. While building his reputation as a solo artist, Jalan spent a lot of time at home in Tensleep, Wyoming (pop. 300) either by the woodstove or on the porch, picking and picking and picking, becoming a roots music virtuoso. True to his slacker past, Jalan managed a mere second place finish in the 1997 Winfield National Guitar Fingerpicking competition.

Jalan is spending the late fall of 2011 and winter of 2012 on a sailboat in and around the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean busily working on his nautical skills, banjo licks and suntan.