Bio

Justin Wells likes to call his music “desert drivin’ folk-rock.” A Kerrville Finalist and Telluride Troubadour, this singer/songwriter aims his lyrical and melodic gifts on his love for the American West.

Although born and raised on the coast (the San Francisco Bay Area), Justin has always been inspired by the mountains and deserts further inland. Summers were spent roaming and fishing the wilderness of Idaho. By the time he was in college and started performing as a singer/songwriter, he had a summer job as an Idaho fly fishing guide.

Justin solidified his reputation as a gifted songwriter with the 1999 release of his debut album, Lovelock to Winnemucca, recorded with his band, Center Divide. Inspired by and thematically based on Justin’s travels in the West, the album traces both the geographic and emotional journey of a love-lost traveler on a lonely Nevada highway. iTunes calls it an album of “vibrancy and insight,” woven into “an instrumental mesh of pianos, guitars, and percussion.”

Justin has earned multiple honors on the prestigious folk festival circuit. He was a 1999 New Folk Finalist at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, and he took third place in the Troubadour contest at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, also in 1999. In 2000 and 2003 he was a New Folks finalist at the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival in Lyons, Colorado. And in 2002, his song “The Last Temptation of Odysseus” was released on the compilation album Songs Inspired by Literature alongside tracks by Bruce Springsteen, Suzanne Vega, and Aimee Mann.

Now a high school English teacher, Justin continues to spend his summers roaming the West, gathering inspiration from the mountains and singing his songs to appreciative audiences when he comes back down the hill.