Bruce Lande

Bruce Lande has spent six decades turning a room of strangers into one crowd singing the same song. He can open with Grateful Dead for an eight-year-old and close with Perry Como for a grandmother — often at the same event — and he reads the room instantly, every time.

Bruce Lande has been playing guitar for sixty years, and in that time he's learned to read a room the way other performers read sheet music. He's led a hundred wedding guests — bartender and hotel manager included — in a conga line to “The Loco-Motion.” He's played two nights of Southern rock next to the tattoo tent at a biker wedding, and provided the music for a mayor's inaugural ball. He's made a grandmother cry with Sinatra's “My Way” the same week a Harley rider sang along to Johnny Cash at the next table. His repertoire runs from Perry Como and Andy Williams to Morgan Wallen and Joe Diffie, gospel to classic rock to neo-traditional country, backed by a self-built song library hundreds deep that lets him take almost any request. He sings, flatpicks, plays harmonica leads, and loops guitar and keyboard together live. Based in Wilmington, NC, with a weekly club residency and a growing YouTube channel of classic-cover performances.

Music runs in Bruce Lande's family — his grandmother was a church organist, his mother and sister both played piano. He didn't pick up a guitar himself until he was twenty, but once he did, he taught himself by ear for the people he loved: “Yellow Bird” for his mother, “Blowin' in the Wind,” fingerstyle, for his father. That foundation became flatpicking, strumming, and the chicken-pickin' style he still plays every night, sixty years later.

From there the stages got bigger and stranger. He fronted an original rock band in the 1980s, and from 2015 to 2017 led a group that mixed Southern rock, gospel, and old-time country. Underneath it all, for years, he was a street performer — and busking taught him something no stage gig ever could: a few seconds to stop a stranger, and the instinct to know instantly what they want to hear. He's never lost that instinct, and it's what sets him apart from a guitarist who simply plays songs well.

In practice, that means he can open with Grateful Dead for an eight-year-old boy and close with Shaboozy for his sister, then turn around and give their grandmother Perry Como and Andy Williams. He's played Sinatra's “My Way” and watched a grandmother cry while her son-in-law sang along to Johnny Cash and her granddaughters danced to “Wagon Wheel” — three generations, one table, five songs. He's played two nights of Southern rock set up beside the tattoo tent at a biker wedding (they liked the band enough to put them up overnight), provided the music for the inaugural ball of the Mayor of Rome, New York, and led a hundred-plus guests — bride, groom, grandparents, bartender, and hotel manager — through “The Loco-Motion” from ballroom to lobby. At a small wine bar, he's held a room with Harry Chapin's “A Better Place to Be” and Gordon Lightfoot's “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” — songs most performers won't attempt.

He's a multi-instrumentalist as well as a guitarist: harmonica leads played live, keyboard intros worked out by ear (“Piano Man,” “Crocodile Rock,” “House of the Rising Sun”), and a looper pedal that lets him lay down guitar and step over to keyboard, playing both at once. He's built his own version of a piano player's fake book, but for guitar — hundreds of songs deep — so when someone makes a request, he can usually find it and make it sound like he's played it for years.

He plays weddings, private parties, corporate events, memorial services, country clubs, coffee shops, bars, restaurants, churches, bluegrass jams, senior centers, and open mics, and currently holds a weekly residency in the Wilmington, North Carolina area. His repertoire has recently expanded into neo-traditional country — Morgan Wallen, Joe Diffie, “Folsom Prison Blues,” “On the Road Again,” “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” — on top of six decades of everything else. He also maintains a YouTube channel of full-length classic-cover performances approaching 4,000 watch hours.