In many ways, my initial encounter with Johnny Dowd's work left me with the same set of conflicting emotions that I had when I first read the Flannery O'Connor short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," a disturbing tale of a Southern family on a Sunday outing that ends in a horrific encounter with a serial killer. I was so sickened by the brutality of its conclusion and the believability of the violence that I tossed the book away from me, nausea nearly overwhelming my admiration for her talent.

I thought about this experience the night I first saw Dowd play live. His silver-flecked hair stuck out wildly, his guitar convulsed in his calloused hands, and he told stories about stripping himself stark naked and giving away his skin and bones. Ghostly keyboard lines wavered unpredictably through the mix, drummer Brian Wilson pushed it all along with eerily erotic percussion, and vocal foil Kim Sherwood-Caso slid her clear, icy soprano accompaniments over the whole sordid ruckus. Entranced as I was with the hypnotic, girl-drowned-in-the-river feel of it all, I found myself cautiously backing away from the stage.

A year later, Dowd is speaking to me over the phone from his home in Ithaca, New York. The contradictions and coexisting shades of dark and light that make him such a fascinating character impress me immediately. "I'm more of a reader than a musician," Dowd explains. He is reading Manson in His Own Words. "Interesting guy, you know? Not unlike your uncle or something. What he did was strange, of course. It's like that Timothy McVeigh guy. Everybody's so, 'Oh, he's so ordinary, how could he do this?' Like he couldn't have any nice qualities. Hitler might have had a great sense of humor. I don't think he did, but you know, he could have loved animals."

Such awareness of the complexities of human nature are evident in his first collection of murder ballads, Wrong Side of Memphis, which he recorded on a four-track at the age of 48. "At that time I was playing the same songs, in the same bar, in the same town, to an ever-diminishing number of people," he says. "All my friends were talking about retirement, and I was struggling to get by. It was really my own disorganization and lack of confidence to put myself out into the world. Strangely enough, when I did, something did happen."

What happened was an unpredictably warm response from the record industry, a deal with Koch Records, and a place at the top of many year-end critical polls in 1996. The level of violence in his work provoked a great deal of speculation about his inspirations, and, as it turns out, much of his work is highly autobiographical. "Part of it was the time I grew up," he says. "Violence is easier to write about, and it's more familiar to me both in the sense of the life I've lived and the things I'm afraid of." Still, he does hope to encompass other, less foreboding themes in his future recordings. "I did that first record and it was kind of like, 'Oh, Johnny the maniac.' I'm sure, like anybody, that I'm a victim of my own press. I had never had any feedback before, and I did that record and it was full of murder and rape, and everybody loved it. So then you gotta kill a few people on the next record. I think I have been getting away from that."

Overall, though, Dowd is compelled to write from his experience. "I can't really write a song from the point of view of an alien... well I could, but the alien would look a lot like me." He also references that perpetual struggle to do the right thing, even when vengeance seems like the only alternative. The "golden rule" is a phrase that turns up several times on his latest release, Temporary Shelter. "I think it was Hart Crane the poet who said the one rule you could live by was to be kind, and that's kind of the same to me as the golden rule. I feel, like a lot of people, that I wasn't the nicest person in my youth. I don't look back on that with any nostalgia or romantic feelings. If I died tomorrow and they put on my tombstone, 'He was a pretty nice guy,' I'd be happy with that."