Blog | Music: LI Pulse Singer-Songwriter Series

There really is no such thing as an ending.  Things pause, transform, get reborn.  But nothing ever ends.

I’m thinking about endings right now because this past month’s installment of The LI Pulse Singer-Songwriter Series at The Cinema Arts Centre will be it for a while.  We had a great year of shows (scroll down this page to review and reminisce), and we’re metaphorically flying south for the winter to take some time and reflect on the idea behind the series and how we might continue to innovate and bring wildly imaginative voices to new ears.

Our final installment featured (fittingly) two emerging artists, Cassandra House and Jeff Beauman.  Cassandra creates a kind of newish Americana and singer-songwriter music that fans of Neko Case and Kathleen Edwards might like.  Her songs are earnest explorations of relationships, love, and whatever exists in between and create an interesting juxtaposition with her seemingly whimsical personality and lighthearted exterior.  I, for one, enjoy profundity born out of whimsy…especially when delivered with a mellifluous voice and that lovely seal familiarity stamped all over it.

There are certain musicians who carry the indie moniker in their wallets and there are some who truly embrace the spirit of independent music.  Jeff Beauman is of the latter.  He (along with a super group of beautiful friends who function like a family) has been making music in bands for several years in the Philadelphia area, on Long Island, and in NYC, but you probably wouldn’t know it.  This is due to a combination of a serious case of shyness and perhaps a lack of a desperate need to get the music “out there,” so to speak (although I’m glad I left the show with a new CD of his newest songs recorded with friends).  But isn’t that the case of so many of our favorites?  I’m thinking of Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, and other introverts that have come and gone, some tragically and way too soon.  Jeff’s music, centered on hypnotic and pulsing acoustic guitar lines is subdued but wrought with the tension associated with 90s alternative rock bands like Superchunk and Sunny Day Real estate.  These comparisons might also be informed by Tony Magliato’s spacey-melodic guitar playing.  Together, Jeff and Tony wove a weird but beautiful fabric that wrapped around Jeff’s murmurs (think Michael Stipe circa early 80s or The Sea and Cake’s Sam Prekop) and guttural moans.

It felt right to close the series down with two “new” voices for you, our beloved readers and audience.  I hope you will stay with us when we resurface.  I want to always be left with the “new” the “what’s next” in the world.  It’s kind of what this magazine embraces and certainly what this writer/musician/teacher/occasional visual artist wants to put out there in the universe.  Something real.  Something imaginative.  Something new.  Thanks for a great year!

Find Cassandra House on Twitter and Facebook

www.reverbnation.com/jeffbeauman

Check out the video here!

When I introduced Chris Barron at last month’s installation, I mentioned something about how, for me, New York City in the 90s belonged to The Spin Doctors.  It was a funny time.  I had just started teaching in Brooklyn.  A distilled version of Hip Hop and vacuous Pop were starting to rear their shiny heads.  I was in the second of several “urban” chapters in the book of my life and often found myself haunting East Village dives like Nightingale’s for signs of real life. 

Occasionally, I’d see stickers I’d recognize on bathroom walls or spot old Spin Doctors posters or photos alongside images of John Popper from Blues Traveler, Renny from The Authority, or the guys in The Choosy Mothers.  These bands were making people dance like bad music on the radio was making people dance (I guess it was a kinetic time), but they were doing it in an hyper-musical way with crazy grooves, positive vibes, and loads of good old-fashioned jamming. 

At the center of all of this was Chris Barron and his quirky/sinewy/awesome voice and delivery.  He and his band were a hodgepodge of different styles that came together like a great city might bring together different peoples and customs and cultures.  Because I grew up on strange blend of U2, KISS, Armenian music, and Dvorak, I knew a thing or two about merging and instantly was mesmerized by Chris and The Spins and the swirls and the experimentation and all of the just plain fun.  To boot, Chris was a champion of the underdog.  He dug Jimmy Olsen.  He quoted Shakespeare.  He was literary and a rocker.  Thus, he became a cool dude.

Fast forward 15-20 years, and Chris is still cool…and still rockin’.  His demeanor has only grown more playful and sincere and his writing more mature.  It’s interesting to observe how he changes from playing in front of 1,000+ people (at The Bowery Ballroom with The Spins, just a week before our show, as part of the 20 year reissue/rerelease of Pocket Full of Kryptonite tour) to playing in front of 50.  Some stuff stays the same, and other stuff shifts slightly toward the intimate.  He shares dreams and talks about his hit singles like they’re old friends whom all of us once knew a while back.  He urges us to reconnect.  And we do.

It was a real pleasure opening up the show for Chris Barron.  We’ve played on the same stage before, but somehow this was more satisfying.  Maybe we’re more awake than we were in the 90s.  Who knows.  All I know is that he’s a great guy – humble and modest – and a pretty amazing songwriter too.  He understands what a gift it is to be able to play and make a living from music, especially for him (for more on this, see my article on Chris Barron published earlier this year).  And while music is only part of the way I make a living in this world, I totally acknowledge the gift too and how, when in the presence of it being made well, I revel at its ability to keep on making old things new again.  And again and again. 

Just go ahead now, music.  Don’t ever stop.

alansemerdjian.com
chrisbarron.com

Check out the video here!

I love the juxtapositions that happen in this series.  I love how the sound of one songwriter rubs up against the sound of another.  I love age variances in styles, and aesthetics.  I love how similarities glow and differences swell.  Right in front of our eyes.  The last Wednesday of every month.

The idea behind this month’s installment was to showcase more rooms in the house of rock.  Mike Longo and Steve Messina are pretty different types of songwriters, but there’s a ruggedness in their respective personas that, in my eyes, led to a sensible pairing.  One is a youngish indie rocker with a true appreciation of honest and inventive songwriting.  The other is a troubadour of the scene for many years and head of the cinematic art rock collective Blow Up Hollywood.

I first met Mike Longo when his very cool band (in the best sense of the word – unpretentious, unassuming, unhipster,…so not loaded with irony) My Summer performed on the same bill as my improvisational noise and funk and jazz project Stratosphere.  He played an inspired set of eclectic rock, stayed for our set, and even picked up my guitar and sat in on the fun.  It impressed me.  A young rocker not afraid to tread in the waters of extemporaneous weirdness.  I knew there was something there, and I wanted to hear it stripped down and free from the noise (a very wonderful noise, mind you) that emits from a spirited rock band firing away.  What we heard at this month’s installment was a set of well-crafted-and-mostly-finger-picked acoustic compositions a la King of Convenience.  I heard a bit of Paul Westerberg in him, but that may have been Mike’s propensity to share little bits of heartbreaking wisdom through a gruffy poetic.  I hope he reads this and Googles “Skyway.”

A lot of what I can say about Steve Messina might be found in an article I wrote about Blow Up Hollywood last summer.  I hope some of you check it out or have checked it out.  It was great to see and hear Steve in this context.  The songs were even more haunting and the listening even deeper.  With the exception of a few songs during which his friend Walter joined him with some tasteful guitar accompaniment, Steve played solo.  Several times during his set, he shifted into a kind of storytelling mode in between the music, which made me reconsider the narrative aspects of what he creates.  Experimental music, like experimental writing or painting or whatever, is only good if it wants to make connections with others and bring people together.  And what brings people together better than an honest story?

www.myspace.com/mikelongo
www.blowuphollywood.com

Check out the video here!

The thing about this series is that it’s all about the songwriter.  It’s not about the genres of folk or rock or indie or blues or whatever.  It’s all about the songwriter…and the songwriting.  It’s about shaping something out of words and sound that is uniquely yours and sharing it with the universe, or at least a small little corner of it, once a month.  The idea is to expect something different every month, and this past installment’s lineup certainly delivered.

Colm Clark (aka Crush Limbo and Malcolm Strange) loves pop music.  He loves the glam of it, the weird of it, the possibilities of humor intermingled with it.  He sings about banal conversations and detritus.  He plays like he’s in the garage, and sometime he feels like he’s a robot, suggesting that we too might have such modern proclivities.  The music rocks out and suggests a hint of progressive pop, but mostly Colm is a songwriter who embraces the bittersweet and playful dark poetry of The Velvet Underground on tracks like “Who Loves the Sun,” a song that he himself covered quite adeptly at our gathering.  We found ourselves humming along and offering harmonies and thinking that if we – for some weird reason – didn’t know the song, it would seem like Colm himself wrote it.

And then Mark Lesseraux.  His first song involved a hushed and haunting melody on the piano, deep and resonant crooning about being stuck in a coffin, and an eerie and scratchy falsetto emulating the appropriate clawing noises that follow in the imagination.  Strange for sure, but oh so lovely.  And lest you get the idea that this songwriter if all about the dark stuff, Mark charmed us with playful yet skilful investigations of how the contralto sound might mingle with the blues (think Robert Plant) and what 80s dance songs might sound like if played with subtle acoustic folk inclinations.  There’s a lot of the performance artist in this man.  He’s incredibly entertaining, studied, and very able.  In addition, Mark has just about the most perfect rock voice one might have.  It’s buoyant enough to talk with the gods and rich enough to suggest terrestrial pain.  And the cool thing is that we all got to experience the full range of it in the intimacy of the Cinema Arts Centre’s Sky Room and Café.

Find these artists online, make them your friends on Facebook, and come down for more on the last Wednesday of every month in Huntington from 8-10pm.  We have a few more installments before we take a little break, reflect, and reconfigure things.  Something different.  That’s what we’re after.  What else defines these strange and crazy times better?

www.facebook.com/crushlimbo

www.marklesseraux.com

Check out the video here!

LI Pulse Secret Show #1
an acoustic indie rock concert
on Saturday, August 27th
all day bbq, beer, and live music
featuring West Dakota, Alan Semerdjian, Beat Radio,
and Aeroplane Pageant

*We still have some room! The first 10 people who respond to this and email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) will receive the address and details.