Tony Baltimore

Years before building his genre-bending "alternative roots-rock" sound in the beachside bars and clubs of Key West, Tony Baltimore grew up in urban Maryland, raised by working-class parents who taught their son the value of sweat equity and long hours.

"I come from a family of Italian immigrants," says the singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who regularly plays upwards of eight shows per week. "A work ethic was beaten into me."

That work ethic carried Baltimore through grad school, where he obtained his MFA in poetry. Knowing his way around the written word helped strengthen his songwriting, and Baltimore quickly found himself spending more and more time onstage, playing shows around the mid-Atlantic region before moving to Key West in search of new inspiration in 2010. What he found was a free-spirited town whose culture reached far beyond the island cliches popularized by Jimmy Buffet songs. This was a place where you could be anything you wanted to be. For a solo artist looking to make music that abandoned parameters, funneled a wide range of influences into something new, and blurred the boundaries between genres, Key West immediately felt like home.