Martín Prechtel

Songs from the Red Dust of Life is just a clear-hearted acoustic recording of me, Martín Prechtel, singing alone with my guitar. This album is a gift from me to you and is also meant as music to go with my trilogy of books called Stories of My Horses. But everybody around here just calls the Songs from the Red Dust of Life: Martín’s Cowboy Album.

This album is just me singing my heart out playing my old 1930 mahogany Martin guitar, or my old 1972 D52 twelve string, or my Spanish Vihuela (on Little Joe the Wrangler), just like we always did, and we still do here, like everyone should do, whatever the music. Each song was a live single take with no layering, overdubs, or voices, or instruments added later. Just me and the guitar of the day. Unlike all the rock music we’d been doing (which I dearly love), Songs From the Red Dust of Life was recorded on a vintage, reel-to-reel, tape and tube analog 12 track machine, using old fashion ribbon mics, and live tube phantom mics, and put through an original tape Echo-Plex and 1950’s spring reverb unit: all the same equipment used to make recordings in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Well, I hope you love Songs from the Red Dust of Life as much as I loved making it. From my family to you and yours.

For liner notes for Songs from the Red Dust of Life, which include Martín’s full description of the album and a history of each song please visit the album’s web page.

You can listen to Songs from the Red Dust of Life by Martín Prechtel on any major streaming service including: Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and probably any other streaming service that you use.

“This series, Stories of My Horses, is not just a compendium of imaginative romantic narratives written to casually entertain the horse loving public.

As romantically remembered as they might seem to be, they are actually straightforward historical accounts of what happens when a life-loving fool like me, a native of that beautiful land-locked, cultural island called Northern New Mexico, who in the latter half of the 20^th century, decides he must live his everyday life in direct defiance of the soul shrinking threat of modernity’s earth-wrecking ugliness and mediocre existence, by keeping some modicum of the bright shine and outrageous living passion of our real souls alive by flying free and beautiful on the backs of flesh and blood horses over a live unpeopled, unmanicured land…

I’ll admit I’m a romantic and heroic. But to be honest, it’s not my fault: it’s the fault of all the horses I’ve ever known. For horses since forever, real horses I mean, have always been romantic, noble and heroic by definition of their very existence, and to be with them well, you too have to develop a soul that corresponds!

In my romantic struggle for beauty in an unromantic mechanical age, my horses, simply by how they were, and how we looked, and how we were together, although no more than a tiny broadside against the ghost ship of mediocrity of this crazy age was some kind of victory just by the fact that we still existed. Horses inspire courage against hopeless odds just by their courage and beauty.”

Bolad’s Kitchen classes happen in four-year courses where people can continue learning in a much fuller way the connected overview of all things that I, Martín Prechtel, teach and believe.

Each time a class meets, we pick up right where we left off the last time we met. In this way, by means of lecture, riddle, music and hands on participation, students are taught in an ongoing-continuous-stream of learning, not unlike the way many tribal people learn in a village setting.

Without the time limitations one experiences in annual workshops or the sporadic conference: where only the surface of anything is barely scratched, I created Bolad’s Kitchen School so that those who want to continue learning with me in a deeper way most certainly have a place where, with others of a similar mind, they can come and do just that.

All of Martín’s beautiful, award-winning books are available here for purchase. Order print copies directly from us, which will be personally inscribed by the author for no additional charge.

New Release! The third volume in the Stories of My Horses trilogy is here in hardcover and on audiobook! The Canyon Wren is the continuation and beautiful punchline of the full tale of Martín Prechtel’s award-winning Trilogy: The Story of My Horses, and picks up right where The Wild Rose leaves off. This third book in the trilogy brings the story far away from all those troubled times, ins and outs, hardships and betrayals, involved in the author’s effort to gather up again those old style Indian Ponies of his youth, and heads us back out into the wild land and the beauty of ranchito New Mexico, where as an integral part of the lives of his new family, their family herd of rare Spanish/Native New Mexico horses play out a series of unexpected peculiarities and surprising horse antics that push the envelope of what mainstream culture has come to assume defines horses and the people that have them.

Audiobooks Now Available: Martín has recorded all of his books as audiobooks, so readers and listeners alike now have the golden opportunity to hear the author himself reading his books aloud. The audial versions of all three Volumes of the award-winning Stories of My Horses Trilogy, The Mare and the Mouse, The Wild Rose , and The Canyon Wren respectively, are newly available for purchase and download directly through our website and wherever audiobooks are sold! Audiobook versions of Rescuing the Light, The Smell of Rain on Dust, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, Stealing Benefacio’s Roses, and Long Life, Honey in the Heart can be purchased and downloaded directly from the publisher, North Atlantic Books, or wherever audiobooks are sold (Audible.com, Audiobooks.com, Libro.fm, etc).