Stephen Mortensen

 “If I made a million dollars today, I would have earned 10 cents an hour for all the practice and time put in,” he says. Like many incorrectly labeled an “overnight success,” Stephen’s been making music his entire life.  At age 5, Stephen sang in the church choir, as did his six siblings—the “Mortensen Mob” were all musical. Inspired by his concert pianist mom, who was choir director at both Camanche High school and Methodist church in hometown Clinton, Iowa, he started  classical training on piano at age 7, and the trombone at age 10.

Stephen’s lifelong love affair with the guitar began at age 14, when his mom brought home a guitar and a Kingston Trio record and taught him a few songs. Within months he’d formed his first folk group, which got paying gigs, performed regularly, and for the mid-west were in high demand.

The day he graduated from high school, Stephen hitchhiked to NYC with his guitar, and the summer of ’65 was playing at "pass the hat" coffee houses in Greenwich Village. In ’68 he was drafted to Vietnam, assigned to the 101st Airborne. Cheap Vietnamese guitars and singing in bunkers were for him a part of that Vietnam scene.

Fall ’70 found Stephen at University of Iowa, Iowa City on the G.I. bill. “The Mill” pizza house and bar was the hang out for the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he played and sang  during the 5 years he was earning his BFA in Art. Stephen was the last person to sing at the old Mill and the first person to sing at the new Mill. 

Life—marriages and divorces, band breakups, jobs and travel, being a full time part-time dad to his son Axel—somehow separated Stephen from his guitar. But public performance began again after meeting a Monterey poet, Taelen Thomas, in 2000 who inspired him to play Woody Guthrie to Taelen’s John Steinbeck. Stephen’s life-long love of word and music was reignited…this is his first CD, appropriately entitled simply “Stephen Mortensen.