artist Mark Davis

Driving rock. Raw folk. Effervescent pop. Bombastic explorations. Anthems and weepers, wrapped in strikingly attractive visual artwork. In his ongoing quest to explore the vast musical landscape between Townes Van Zandt and Motörhead, Mark Davis presents his most ambitious album to date: Eliminate the Toxins.

Recorded with Lorrie Matheson in Calgary, Alberta, the genre-defying Eliminate the Toxins is at once cohesive and sweepingly diverse. While forging new territory, Mark pays homage to musical forebears such as Guided By Voices, Duritti Column, The Byrds, David Bowie, Pan American, R.E.M. and Urge Overkill.

Sharing the reins with Shuyler Jansen, Mark Davis guided the band Old Reliable through fifteen years and four recordings. His music has appeared on more than twenty different releases, as well as in feature-length and short films and on a popular television series.

Mark’s last 2-CD release - Don’t You Think We Should Be Closer? and Mistakes I Meant to Make (2007) - was praised as “a two album tour de force” (Exclaim, Penguin Eggs) and “the roots release of the year” (Eye); and was lauded internationally by an abundance of four- and five-star reviews. UNCUT magazine (London, UK) called the dual release “stunning” and Le Cri Du Coyote (France) called the song “By the Time” “one of the most beautiful songs of the century”.
On the strength of his dual release, Mark became the most-played Canadian roots artist on the CBC’s Galaxie satellite radio for 2007, spent several weeks atop the National Campus and Community Radio roots chart, and made the year’s top 10 lists of the both the NCCR and Exclaim Magazine. 

Mark has shared stages with such luminaries as Guy Clark, Alejandro Escovedo, K’Naan, Fred Eaglesmith, Kathleen Edwards, The Great Lake Swimmers, Gurf Morlix, The Corb Lund Band, Ray Condo, Giant Sand, The Sadies, RichardBuckner and Pieta Brown, to name a few.