Related show
My group, aptly named the Catbirds (I am, after all, Catbirdman), has a new album coming out very soon. It should be available on my band site within the next few weeks, and physical copies will be in my hands in the next few days. This album, Subanimal Sounds, is the cumulative result of 20 years of backlogs, logjams, listlessness, and unfinished lists. One item on the list has now been checked off, thank God.
The above artwork, fashioned in a dark and woolly place by the great Kurt Lightner, fits the songs perfectly. My music draws from blurry impressions of sources, from half-remembered 70s TV soundtracks and devoured mice left on the doormat, to Beach Boys in the background of the sub shop that my Dad took me to on Saturday mornings, to the haze of self-awakening and the obscure forms that accompanied 90s shoegaze, to the singalongs for one that whirl through my head as an adult, singing to my cat like a fool.
Ah yes, the cat. I have driven away more than one woman when the revelation was made: I write songs about my cat. More accurately, my cat shows up in songs that are more deeply focused on other things: mainly the good old human condition. Why animals speak, how animals speak, if they speak at all, and what it might signify. The animal will. The decomposing guts and bones of a fresh kill. I do not apologize about writing songs about my cat. Her name is Addie, by the way.
If you’re looking for RIYL types of comparisons, well, the easiest frame of reference is Belle And Sebastian. I don’t usually explore the soft pink underbelly of soft rock as purely as they have, but I have been known to adopt the type of “hard melody” usually credited to the Beatles and onwards, appropriating it into a more wistful and stark setting There’s a similar humor in my songs, and this, too, has driven away many women in my life. I do not apologize for my humor. Here’s a song that in my mind illustrates the Belle And Sebastian connection:
The Beach Boys are the other easy reference point, and the modular wackiness of When you had babies is an example of that; it was in my mind coming from the Smiley Smile fantasy world of little pads and gentle jungles:
The Catbirds: When you had babies
My songs get dark. I often visit not just the cat, but the prey. I try to find out what happened to the prey, where it went. Every now and then I find myself in the loneliest place imaginable. I’ve written about that, and it is on this album. Sometimes it’s raw (“Wild Cat of Borneo”), sometimes it’s calloused (“Eyes in the dark”), and sometimes it’s a sadness bordering on elation (“The Eternal Meow”). Sometimes it’s naff (the various “chants” and interludes on the album), but don’t tell me that to my face.
The Catbirds will be playing a show to promote this CD, Thursday, March 4 at the Hideout in Chicago. We’re honored to support Baby Teeth and their fabulous brand of spastic stomp and bad-ass kitsch. The Catbirds feature members of the Chicago group Detholz!, and while we can’t promise the same amount of glorious spectacle (I can only dream…), we do hope that at least some of you will respond by throwing underwear onto the stage. It’s a natural response, after all, to psycho-cerebral musings on the existence of the Soul and the various levels of animal life, as told through cute little songs I sing to my kitty cat.
So please, come one, come all to the Hideout on March 4. There will be Baby Teeth merch for sale, and there will be Subanimal Sounds. If you like the samples in this post, we hope you will come out for the live offering and/or check the Catbirds’ website for streaming music, an EP for sale, and the album, which will be available there by mid-March. And even if you can’t stomach songs about a cat, well, just come around to see the Detholz! lads and to get blown away by Baby Teeth. See you then!
Catbirds band site: http://catbirdman.com/
Hideout main site: http://www.hideoutchicago.com/
Baby Teeth band site: http://www.lujorecords.com/artist.php?artistid=39
Baby Teeth MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/babyteethmusic
Detholz! band site: http://www.detholz.com/
Detholz! blog: http://detholz.wordpress.com/
Detholz! MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/thedetholz
Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=289529616916&ref=mf
A quick, unfocused post tonight.
Lesser lights are laid out like luminaries
Here on the Subanimal Sounds blog you will witness the brave and limitless wrestling match with the abyss, as two songwriters bash it out each month, stabbing vainly in the dark, trying to write songs. Catbirdman is one player; Mr. Crozier is another. The challenge has gone out: to write one song each month. For January, there are no rules. Just write it and let it stand. Prove you can do it. By the end of the month there will be audial proof, and it will show up here on this blog. Catbirdman has a head start; the January song is written already. It’s called “Lesser Lights.” Soon I will post the lyrics, and in the meantime I call to Mr. Crozier: leave the Bank behind, just for a moment; follow the real reason you get up and get out — write that song.
On this Tuesday night, on the back of my weekly call with the Catbirds’ business manager, I’m pondering the overlap between business and dreams. “If you build it they will come” isn’t always a sound marketing strategy, but it’s the only one worth leaning on when you’re laying the foundation. This track by Voxtrot looks at “the queer life” versus “the real life;” the former a foray into fancy and unbridled wandering, and the latter a grounded, legitimized, and accepted facade. The queer life looms behind the real life, like the subconscious, in its immeasurable way, driving the world of the conscious. What we are is what we know and what we can see. But what drives us is what we want to be.
I’ve been sitting on an interview with Baby Teeth from August 6 of this past summer. Eventually I’ll post it here on Subanimal Sounds. Baby Teeth are an earnest but scary group of guys from Chicago, and when you get to know them they’re not so scary. Abraham Levitan is the leader, a cool-mannered, if gawky, outsider with a self-proclaimed history of obsession, if you can believe his lyrics. He started with the great girl groups of the 1960s, and found inspiration in various pockets of showbiz from there on. Abraham always has a half-smile bordering on a full-on guffaw. He means it, and isn’t bothered with the window dressing. Pitchfork reviewed Baby Teeth’s 2009 album, Hustle Beach, and in so doing quickly devolved into label-mongering and contemplating the meaning of the term “guilty pleasure.” What’s guilty about a pleasure? You either like it or you don’t. I do. Abraham sings it. I believe it.
Once or twice a week, I pass through the “Miracle on 34th Street” – the boundless bombast of garish lights that floods the one block between my house and my favorite watering hole, Rocket to Venus. They sell hot sausages there, three for $5. There are Christmas trees made of hubcaps, and one made of old vinyl records. there’s a Natty Boh logo in lights. There are gawkers galore. Tonight we wish you “Season’s Greetings” from Baltimore, USA, with hopes of more substantial tidings to come. To usher in these greetings, we have a stellar track from Baltimore’s finest, Beach House, and one from Baltimore’s most obscure group, the Catbirds.