Album Notes

Oh, hello there. My name is Moxie Block. I write songs, I sing them and I think bio’s are weird. Something inside me dies every time I attempt to write glowingly about myself in the third person. Such nonsense should be reserved for the aristocratic and the mentally unhinged - and I double dare you to prove my affinity to either.

I was born and raised in London, but have resided in Brooklyn for many, many moons with my husband and our two three legged cats. My adolescence was spent endlessly singing in some strange melange of highfalutin operas at the E.N.O, tours with the National Theatre, cringeworthy supper jazz and supremely awesome Prince tributes. I am also the proud parent of a rather silly degree in songwriting from Berklee College of music.

Suffering from some pretty serious over-schooling, I have spent my post academic life trying my darnedest to undo almost all that I learnt and replace it with an abundance of exotic adventures, a gorgeous amount of squandered time and true love. 

When operation waste-life ran (strolled) it’s course, I commenced with project big-fun which essentially consisted of collecting the best stories from operation waste-life and turning them into the record: ‘when you were in jail’. Should the description of pot-pan-jim-jam not satisfy your understanding of musical genres, I suppose my style dances somewhere between cabaret, tin-pan alley, rockabilly, klezmer and folk.

Thanks to the generous ‘donations’ of some of New York's finest degenerate poker players, I was able to self fund the entire project. Having complete creative control over the process allowed me to work slowly and strangely, and I am proud to say that I wouldn’t change a thing. I was able to handpick some of my favorite musicians to play, co-produce, co-arrange and in the case of my baby brother, co-write with, resulting in a joyous collaboration jamboree. I'm not sure what it’s like to create under the expectant eye of a major record label, but I would be surprised if they would be cool with an artist firing a drummer for wearing a belly shirt and replacing them with a deconstructed refrigerator and a fire escape. ‘when you were in jail’ consists of 9 songs that span 10 years of jailbird lovers, new york summers, teenage infatuations and impressive biscuit consumption, as dark and sad as it is treacly saccharine. If I do say so myself.

you can find my glorious band and I preforming these songs and more around new york, a variety of invented instruments in hand, foot and mouth.