American singer/songwriter, guitarist and bassist. Works mostly in the Americana/roots genre, his music blending elements of rock & roll, blues, country, honky tonk, and southern swamp. Has played with a number of artists as well as fronting his own acts and releasing works under his own name and as Stephen El Rey.
Stephen Rey was born in Victorville, California. When he was three his family moved to San Diego, where he grew up mostly in the suburb of Lakeside. He attributes much of his musical influence to time spent on his grandparents' ranch in El Centro. He got into punk rock, started playing in bands at age fourteen, and at seventeen spent time busking in San Francisco and Berkeley. After some demo recordings funded by major labels, in 1998 he obtained a publishing deal with Warner Chappell as a songwriter; some of his songs appeared in movies and documentaries. However, he put this venture aside to focus on his growing family.
In the 2000s he began performing as a side man in local San Diego acts, playing bass in Operator X and Lady Dottie & The Diamonds. He fronted his own group, Stephen Rey & The Slicks, with drummer Brian Cantrell (Operator X, Lady Dottie & The Diamonds), guitarist Mike Butler, and bassist Ryan Sinn (ex-The Distillers and Angels & Airwaves). They released the album Old Fashioned Future in 2011. The following year he put together a stripped-down version of this act called Stephen Rey And The Sextrash, with Nathan Beale (Lady Dottie & The Diamonds, ex-Dirty Sweet) on guitar and Tim Lowman (Low Volts) on percussion.
Over the next few years he played bass with Bartender's Bible, Mad Juana, Diablo Dimes, John Reis, El Vez, The Schizophonics, and The Little Richards. Joining the Johnny Cash tribute band Cash’d Out, he began playing original material as an opening act on tour. This led him to record and release music under the name Stephen El Rey, including the self-released Stephen El Rey Sextet EP, (2016), the Poor Born EP (2017, on Pig Baby Records), and the Memphis Sessions LP (2019, Pig Baby), along with several digital singles. In 2020 he formed the avant-garde "21st century duet" Tormenta Rey with Leilainia Marcus (aka Leilainia Lovelight), in which they perform original compositions and obscure songs from the 1920s and 1930s, with Rey playing guitar and singing and Lovelight playing trumpet and performing theatrical dance.
