“It was pretty easy to get involved with the arts,” singer-songwriter and keyboard player Bukka Allen once told the Houston Chronicle. “It was something that was always around … I never second guessed it.” Of course, he would eventually come to understand that not everybody grew up in such a creatively fertile environment, with not one but two highly esteemed artists for role models: his father, Texas songwriting legend and world-renowned visual artist Terry Allen, and his mother, the actress, writer, and performance artist Jo Harvey Allen. Music was the discipline Bukka pursued himself, winning a scholarship to the prestigious Berklee School of Music on the strength of a Lloyd Maines-produced album he wrote and recorded while still in high school. He moved to Austin after college and quickly became one of the city’s most sought-after session musicians and sidemen, recording and touring with artists ranging from his father (naturally) to the Flatlanders, Ian Moore, the BoDeans, Joe Walsh, Jack Ingram, Ryan Bingham, James McMurtry, and the Court Yard Hounds, among dozens more. But he’s also made time to write and record his own music, too, scoring a handful of independent films with his production team, Screen Door Music, and releasing two strikingly arresting solo albums, 1998’s Sweet Valentine and 2007’s ‘Confidante’. Bukka’s songs are invariably marked by a hauntingly dreamlike quality, steeped in mystery and twilit beauty but shot through with undercurrents of palpable tension and jolts of apocalyptic force.