For years Steven Budden has been toiling away in his San Francisco apartment, wrestling with the muse and releasing songs under the name Saint Milkweed.  His diverse musical influences include; Roscoe Holcomb, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Julian Bream, Blind Willie Johnson, The Mountain Goats, Beck, and Charlie Patton.

He was born in Mt. Clemens Michigan in 1979. He relocated to Arizona with his family circa 1984, but he eventually blew out of the desert like a tumble weed and rolled toward the Pacific, into San Francisco in 2002. While attending graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute (in Painting), songwriting began to assert itself as a dominant strain in his life. In visual art as in music, he works to balance innovation with a certain reverence for traditions that have been handed down and polished for generations. Currently he lives in Elk Grove, California, and feels drawn up and down the Pacific Coast.

Steven also studied Holistic Healing Arts at the World School of Holistic Healing Arts in San Francisco and Pleasanton. He is a bodyworker and Holistic Life Coach at Flow Healing Arts.

"These are sad songs. As Elton John once wrote, "They reach into your room. Come feel their gentle touch. When all hope is gone, sad songs say so much."  Songs celebrating the lachrymose nature of the human condition (Buddha: Life is Suffering) can have a cathartic or life- affirming quality when met at the right time, because they are being witness to someone rising out of the depths by summoning the will to share their burden. This aspect of my songwriting was hugely influenced by early Leonard Cohen early in my life, as well as early acoustic blues. 

Saint Milkweed the album was written while I myself was mired in a cyclical depression (though perhaps I wasn't even conscious of it), and before I understood the power of words and the law of attraction. Though these songs were delivered by the muse, they might have been edited or replaced. Like attracts like, and negative songs, especially repeated endlessly like mantras, can accelerate a downward spiral.

The next album will focus on healing consciousness, rather than celebrating its dysfunctions. As a life coach, I promote reprogramming the mind with positive thoughts, and uprooting old, unproductive thoughts that can give rise to a host of ailments, so it no longer makes sense to write songs like this, as beautiful as they may be."

Two Voices in a meadow

A Milkweed

Anonymous as cherubs
Over the crib of God,
White seeds are floating
Out of my burst pod.
What power had I
Before I learned to yield?
Shatter me, great wind:
I shall possess the field.

A Stone

As casual as cow-dung
Under the crib of God,
I lie where chance would have me,
Up to the ears in sod.
Why should I move? To move
Befits a light desire.
The sill of heaven would founder,
Did such as I aspire.

-Richard Wilbur