With his over wrought pompadour rocking and his signature Gretsch hollow-body guitar twanging away, Brian Setzer arrived on the U.S. pop music scene with a vengeance in the early 1980s. Up to that point, American audiences were OK with reruns of Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days—all benign depictions of a clichéd 1950s heartland America.

But when Setzer and his band began getting primetime MTV rotation, an illusion was shattered and a trio of tattooed rockers—who made The Fonz look like a momma’s boy—was introduced into the homes of millions of U.S. teens in the form of the Stray Cats.

In 1980 the Cats strutted their way from their native Long Island, New York, where they received only ho-hum attention, over to England, where Setzer and the boys created a flurr y of excitement among an already-thriving Teddy-boy and punk rock scene. Welsh hit-producer Dave Edmunds took them under his wing, and within months they were rubbing elbows with stars and climbing the record charts. The clincher was an opening spot on a Rolling Stones U.S. tour.

Soon, the Stray Cats became a household word in music circles, and Brian Setzer was enthral ling the guitar wor ld with scorching new takes on riffs he seemingly pulled out of the graveyard. He became admired and respected as a real technical dynamo.

In the middle 1990s the Brian Setzer Orchestra tapped into a fledgling revival of the swing genre that shot him on yet another meteoric rise — this time with the approval of the mainstream music industry—culminating in multiple Grammy Awards and other industry accolades for his CD Dirty Boogie. Since then he’s continued to tour and pump out critically acclaimed CDs with his seventeen-piece rocking band. He records for motion picture soundtracks and has become a holiday favorite, with his Christmas CDs—threatening to replace Harry Connick Jr. as the torchbearer for that revered honor.

But through the years, Brian Setzer has been known to show a softer, more contemplative, spiritual component to his art as well. We wanted to find out where the raucous meets the redeemed.

Risen Magazine: You’ve tackled at least two genres—rockabilly and swing—once thought to be dead-ends musically, and you seem to have reinvented both of them. What does that say about you as a musician?

Brian Setzer: That I like to recycle? [Laughs] It’s funny because I know people say that about me. The rockabilly thing…paralleled punk to me, and it shook up that whole kind of established, performed music at the time. So I was almost maybe a little over-qualified for it since I did read and write music. In the original days, I think those rockabilly guys came out of the hills and plugged in and played.

RM: I understand the rockabilly thing, but how’d that translate into a full-blown orchestra?

BS: That sound, watching the old Johnny Carson Tonight Show, always intrigued me. I thought, “Imagine if I could play my song, ‘Rock This Town’ with a big band behind it.” So I had thought of that a long time ago and eventually had the nerve to try it. It’s been fourteen years now. So that’s kind of how all that started. Also, I liked the themes. I kind of like jumpin around.

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