Dave Herrero came to the blues early, and he never really left. He just kept finding more room inside it.

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The Chicago guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer grew up on Florida’s Gulf Coast, where seeing Buddy Guy on Austin City Limits set something in motion. By 15, Herrero was slipping out of military school to play blues jams around Tampa. At 19, he was already appearing at Springing the Blues and representing Jacksonville at the International Blues Challenge.

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Music, though, had been in the family long before Dave picked up a guitar. His grandfather, Luis Herrero, came to New York from the Dominican Republic in the 1930s, recorded for Victor/RCA with The Dominican Serenaders and performed at venues including the Cotton Club and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. That history was never something Dave set out to imitate. It was simply there, part of the current running underneath everything.

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Another important voice entered his life when he was 18. Felix Reyes, the Texas-born guitarist, songwriter and producer from Oak Cliff, encouraged Herrero’s decision to move to Austin and would become one of the enduring figures in his life: mentor, songwriting partner and, as Dave still calls him, his “spiritual advisor.” Reyes had played a similarly important role in the life of the late Sean Costello, and his influence on Herrero has stretched across decades, records, songs and major turns in the road.

Austin became the place where Herrero’s musical world opened up.

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From 1999 to 2004 he played with Texas musician and poet Matt Powell, whom Herrero credits with teaching him how to write songs, not just play them. “Cheatin’ Blues” remains one of the most important songs in Dave’s live set today. During those years he also toured internationally as guitarist for Archie Bell & the Drells, became part of Austin’s loose community of blues, roots and songwriter musicians, and got to know a teenage Gary Clark Jr.

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The road took over from there.

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Herrero has now completed more than 40 international tours, performing throughout Europe and Scandinavia and in Turkey, France, Spain, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and the Balkans. His own records began documenting the distance traveled. Austin to Chicago earned a 2009 Blues Blast Music Award nomination for Best New Artist Debut, while Corazón, recorded as Dave Herrero & The Hero Brothers Band, brought more soul, rock and Latin influence into a sound still unmistakably grounded in blues.

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Chicago became home in 2004, and over time Herrero became part of the fabric of the city’s music community.

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He has performed repeatedly with Buddy Guy, closing a circle that began years earlier in front of a television set, and appeared with Guy in Playing For Change’s Skin Deep: A Song Across America. He co-produced Jimmy Burns’ album Stuck in the Middle and played guitar on the record. The two have performed and traveled together for years, but “collaborator” doesn’t quite cover it. Jimmy is chosen family.

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His long musical relationship with Anne Harris has been just as personal in a different way. Herrero has played, written and recorded with Harris across multiple projects, contributing guitar and bass to much of Come Hither and writing “Fallen.” More recently, Herrero, Harris and GRAMMY-winning producer Jacob Olofsson co-wrote “I Feel It Once Again,” the title track of Harris’ 2025 album. Their work together also includes “Love Don’t Come for Me,” “Heartbeat” and years of live performances built on the kind of chemistry that can’t really be rehearsed into existence.

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Herrero also performs with César Rosas of Los Lobos in César Rosas & the Chi-Town Playboys and has shared stages with artists including Robert Randolph.

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Then, in February 2026, another piece of the Austin years came back around.

Gary Clark Jr. personally asked Herrero to open his sold-out show at Buddy Guy’s Legends in Chicago, then brought him back onstage for several songs during the headline set. Speaking to the Chicago Sun-Times that night, Clark said, “I’ve known that guy since I was a teenager; I learned a lot from him.”

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Herrero’s music today is a long way from being easily filed under one heading. He still plays blues, and plays it without apology. But the traditional blues guitarist he was in his teens and twenties has gradually grown into a songwriter with a wider palette. The shorthand that has stuck is “psychedelic blues noir meets singer-songwriter music.” It’s as good a description as any. Some songs are dark and cinematic. Others lean into soul, rock or Latin rhythms. Some simply leave space for the guitar to speak. And on a given night, “Cheatin’ Blues” may still be the song that brings the whole room down to a whisper.

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The studio has always been another part of Herrero’s life. With his brother Mike Hero, he formed TrackForce Productions; together, as The Hero Brothers, they created roughly a thousand pieces of music for Harpo Productions and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Herrero later co-founded Who’z The Boss Music, expanding his work into composition, production, publishing and music licensing for film and television.

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And through all of it, there has been Rosa’s Lounge.

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For more than a decade, Herrero has held a weekly residency at the legendary Chicago blues room. Rosa’s has become less a gig than a musical home: a place to work out songs, invite friends, take risks and let a band stretch beyond whatever was planned on paper. Those nights are now becoming the next chapter of his recorded work, with the forthcoming live album Love From Rosa’s Lounge slated for release in late spring 2027.

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There are a lot of miles between the kid watching Buddy Guy on television and the musician Herrero is today. There are even more songs.

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The blues is still there.

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So is everything he found along the way.