About
On stage w/ Trace Adkins
"His songs celebrate human nature and the highs and lows of the terrestrial experience." - Music Mecca Blog
“[Like] drinking Jim Beam at the coffee table” - The New York Times
“It’s ALL country music to me” says Pemberton Roach, describing his latest album, The New Kid. Seamlessly girding his rich baritone with such typically incongruous instruments as flugelhorn, banjo, Moog synthesizer, and pedal steel, Roach is at once a genre-blurring “country” artist for the wildly diverse streaming age and a traditionalist carrying the torch of richly descriptive songwriting.
Growing up in a circa-1729 stone farm house in Pennsylvania’s historic Brandywine Valley, with several formative years spent living on a dirt road in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Pemberton was literally raised on radio, his father operating the small country and bluegrass AM station where rock & roll pioneer Bill Haley began his career working as a disk jockey.
Leaving home for New York City a month after his eighteenth birthday, Roach established a career as a musician-for-hire, performing at venues ranging from soccer stadiums to hay wagons. After working with nearly 200 different artists on five continents (including Trace Adkins, Jello Biafra, Moby, Kevin Hart, Max Weinberg, and Allen Toussaint) he began releasing music under his own name in 2020.
Drawing upon a lifetime of unusually diverse musical and personal experiences, Pemberton’s finely-crafted, rootsy, and instantly catchy tunes celebrate dignity and humor in the quiet moments of our shared humanity.
