I'm incredibly hungover. Jersey parties, man -- they'll do it to you. Right now I hear The Shins coming from my neighbor's backyard, and I'm impressed. Usually they have crappy top 40 songs that are played over and over again at 8 AM on a Sunday morning and I want to scream out my window. But today, it's later, and it's good. But I digress...
Friday night I made it to 2 shows. I sort of expected I wouldn't make it to everything. I think New York should plan out these things accordingly. Make shows go later in the night, until, say, 3 in the morning so us folks can see more. If I had gone to Mercury before Bowery for Snowden, I think I would have made it back in time for The Wrens. But instead, I got to see Morningwood play for the first time. They make me wish I was in a band.
I would have pictures to show you from the shows, but I lost my ATM card (somehow) and didn't have money to buy batteries for my camera. I should try and not lose things all the time.
We are mere days away from the long-awaited release of Issue Six. Today kicks off the preview of Thursday night's show. First up will be Dave Lear playing a special acoustic set to open up the show. Here's an excerpt from his feature in the upcoming issue of the magazine.
Dave Lear is torn between living on the upper east side of Manhattan and eating all the Fruit Loops he wants, or living the life of the artistic musician. After the breakup of his alt-country rock band The Humbuckers, Lear went into a funk, musically and financially.
“It was a doomed venture,” Lear explained over brunch in the East Village. “It was a tumultuous time for me, but luckily I came out on the other end.”
That end is his solo debut, Mr. Sunshine, his collaboration with producer and friend George Dugan. It was Dugan who took Lear out of a seven-year rut with the news that some of his old Humbuckers songs had been resurrected with radio airplay in Missouri, and that people were interested in buying the songs. This was enough to spur Lear to call him back a few weeks later to record some of the hundreds or so songs he had laying around.“Knowing a golden opportunity when I saw one, I coyly suggested that I might be able to fit him into my ‘busy Winter recording schedule’” Dugan explained. Lear went to Dugan’s studio in Washington Heights and played an acoustic session of songs that he had written in the hiatus since the breakup of his last band. He started playing, and according to Lear, a spirit entered the room.
“I felt like I was making art again, and I was inspired. I wasn’t trying to rip anything off, it was something completely different.” But the next step was more difficult. Lear and Dugan toyed around the idea of what to do with the surprising recordings. Lear contemplated throwing his artistic integrity out the window and imagined a life without gigs; just selling songs and getting them on television shows on the WB. But while they were figuring it out, they recorded over forty songs and it was the first time Lear thought of the idea of a solo album.
Mr. Sunshine took over a year to record and borders on white-soul-folk-country-rock. When the album was finished, neither Dugan nor Lear knew exactly what they had created....
Read the rest of the article on Dave Lear, plus features on The GoStation, Maximo Park, Rockets & Cars, The Futureheads, and more on Wednesday. Subscribe to the free magazine here.
Dave Lear opens the show at 7:30 PM.
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