Pierce Edens is an independent musician and singer-songwriter from Western North Carolina. He is best known for his powerful vocals and haunting, fiery music that captivates listening rooms and excites dance floors in equal measure. 

Edens has shared the stage with notables such as the Wood Brothers, Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earl, Southern Culture on the Skids, and Hayes Carl. 

With well over four million streams on multiple platforms and pockets of loyal fans across the nation, audiences clearly indulge in the hard-edged folk sound he creates alongside his long-time bandmate Kevin Reese. 

Sitting side-by-side on stage, the musical duo take their audience on a well-crafted journey. Built song-by-song, the room becomes an experiential fortress filled with Edens’ signature vibrato, an unusually soulful, waverly tenor that conveys each song’s emotional depth. He mingles this with potent, guttural hurls that burst from him in pops and crackles. 

In addition to singing, Edens plays rhythm guitar and kick drum, employing a stripped-down, less-is-more approach to percussion reminiscent of the White Stripes. Reese accompanies Edens with lead guitar, mandolin, and the occasional banjo, completing the duo’s sound that is both intimate and gritty, atmospheric and raw.

Edens learned to play on a left-handed guitar from someone he describes as “an old-timer on Lonesome Mountain.” Drawing from his southern Appalachian music roots and the grunge-rock that took hold of him in his youth, Edens’ genre-bending style is notoriously hard to pin down. As Journal of Roots Music: No Depression author Bill Kopp writes, ”[Edens] is a gritty troubadour who takes what he needs from each style, blending and bending it to suit the needs of his songs.” 

Through the mid- to late-2000s, Edens led a full-piece band called Pierce Edens and the Dirty Work. The band was a rotating cast of local Asheville musicians that eventually whittled down to include Matt Smith on pedal steel, Jesse Hongisto on bass, and Dane Rand on drums. During this time, Edens developed a regional following and self-produced four albums.