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Bill McNeal - Director
Bill McNeal is a singer/songwriter who lives in a rural area of Central Texas, south of Austin. He has performed his original compositions recently as the front man for the eclectic band, Slaves of Utopia. His songs are lyricly intense and range between heartrending tales of lost love and humorous tongue-in-cheek satires.
Bill has just released his first CD, “One Track Mind,” on Texmuse Records. It showcases twelve of his original songs. Recorded at Flashpoint Studios in Austin and produced by Paul Pearcy, “One Track Mind” calls for repeat listening to catch the nuances of Bill’s lyrical talent. Backed by a stellar group of Austin studio musicians, including Kenny Grimes, Glenn Fukunaga, Billy Bright, Richard Bowden and Cindy Cashdollar, Bill’s new CD continues a fine tradition of significant Austin studio performances.
Bill grew up near the small town of Luling on the family ranch, which has been owned by McNeals since the mid-nineteenth century. An oil town, Luling at one time was known as the toughest town in Texas.
By the time Bill started public school, he was already singing along to 78 records and the radio. He was given his first guitar at age 10. As a teenager, he played tuba in the high school band and played with a changing lineup of other kids in groups that at first consisted of guitars and more guitars, and eventually became a cofounder of a band called “The Moods,” which gained quite a reputation in Central Texas in the sixties, playing a mix of rock and roll and country in the rural dance halls of the area. At 18, however, Bill decided he needed to get an education and enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin. Always an avid reader and aspiring writer, he was advised by a high school counselor that he had good verbal skills and would probably make a good lawyer, so he attended law school at UT and practiced law for many years, eventually becoming a board certified trial specialist.
Bill let his music and songwriting slide for many of those years, until he attended the Kerrville Folk Festival for the first time, in the late seventies. He was inspired by the songwriters he heard and met and decided to stop postponing the attention he always felt his music and literary talents deserved and began playing guitar again and writing songs and prose. A sabbatical in the early eighties gave him the time to enter the graduate English program at UT to study literature and creative writing.
As his performance skills improved, Bill began to receive compliments about his songs, which he performed in backyards and parlors and around campfires at the Kerrville Folk Festival. He was asked to perform at a throwback hippie café near Austin known as Alice’s Restaurant and asked some friends to join him. The group eventually became known as the Slaves of Utopia, which played in a number of small town venues across Central Texas.
The Slaves took an extended vacation from performing in 2007 and Bill decided he would follow the encouragement of friends and fellow musicians and get his songs
out to a wider audience by making a CD of some of his original compositions. He is now a recovering trial lawyer who is concentrating his verbal skills in the musical arena. He is also working on a first novel.
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