Nick Gusman sings about stray dogs, river boats and his family’s Southern Missouri homestead with the kind of passion most artists reserve for songs about love and heartbreak. That’s because Gusman’s songs are about love – and identity and freedom and other big ideas – wrapped in lyrics about things he encounters in his daily life.

As his skill at writing and performing have developed, he’s gained an equally passionate, growing audience, not just in his native St. Louis, but across the U.S. He’s toured extensively in this country and opened for established and rising acts like Chris Knight and Charlie Crockett. He and his band, Nick Gusman and The Coyotes, are scheduled for a European tour in the winter.

Music and performing are in Gusman’s blood. His grandfather played country music in the then-rowdy bars of St. Louis’s South Broadway strip. Today, Gusman plays in some of those same, newly popular venues with his grandfather’s 1943 Martin 000-18 guitar. The youngest of four siblings, Nick grew up in working class south St. Louis. After a rebellious adolescence, coupled with a consuming desire to make sense of it all, led him to learn to pick up his grandfather’s guitar and begin writing songs at age 18.

In addition to regularly playing Midwestern venues, he’s toured throughout the U.S. He recorded his first album, “Dear Hard Times,” in 2018 and has been in the studio recording a 10 song album scheduled to be released in the winter of 2020.