His new mother was an elementary school teacher, and his father set up group homes for troubled juveniles.Īfter four years, the family, including an older brother, moved to South Dakota and then to St. He was born March 11, 1969, in Eugene, Ore., and was less than a month old when he was adopted by a Minneapolis couple.

I didn’t so much think, ‘Hey, this could be big.’ I just thought, ‘Hey, this is good.’ ”ĭroge comes to the wanderlust troubadour tradition naturally. “Personally, his music reminded me of the music I’ve always liked over the years-a little bit of Neil Young, a little bit of Dylan, a little bit of Petty. “Pete might have been outside the, but all the musicians in town liked to listen to his band-from Jerry Cantrell to Eddie Vedder,” says Kelly Curtis, who manages Droge as well as Vedder’s band, Pearl Jam. His dates this spring with Petty went so well that Droge has been invited back for another leg of the tour. The young performer’s main exposure, however, has come from being the opening act on high-profile tours with such acts as Petty, Melissa Etheridge and Sheryl Crow. One of Droge’s songs, the quirky and atypical “If You Don’t Love Me (I’ll Kill Myself),” also landed a spot in the hit “Dumb and Dumber” soundtrack. My thinking, I guess, was ‘There may not be any spot for me now, but there will be one someday.’ ”ĭroge was proved right when his debut album, “Necktie Second,” was released early last year by American Recordings and was well received by radio’s new adult album alternative format. “But I always felt there was a place for me because the artists I admired had made records and had enjoyed successful careers. “I was in a band, but it was much more traditional and rootsy, more country than the kind of things the record companies were looking for.

“I was definitely doing something completely different,” the easygoing songwriter says, sitting on a chair in his West Hollywood hotel room. Not Droge, who writes about the longing and doubts of relationships with the softer, more customized edge found in the work of his singer-songwriter heroes, including Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Petty and Gram Parsons.

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