Andy Friedman & The Other Failures
Live at the Bowery Poetry Club
© 2006 City Salvage Records (678277119024)
CD IN STOCK. ORDER NOW. Will ship immediately.
SPECIAL: 10% discount if you buy more than one copy of it today!
"A voice and manner that comes off like a more serious Lord Buckley or a beatnik version of Hank Williams’ alter-ego Luke The Drifter.” (Connect Savannah)
tracks
try this
genres you will love
By Location
Recommended if you like ...
notes
From THE NEW YORKER (2/6 & 2/13/06 issue): Andy Friedman, a visual artist and contributor to this magazine, celebrates the release of his first album, “Live at the Bowery Poetry Club.” Friedman, an erstwhile spoken-word artist who brings projections of his drawings onstage with him, counts the late folksinger Dave Van Ronk among his heroes. Lately he has given in to his passion for country music, singing (in a plainspoken way) with the help of a backing band, the Other Failures, and some shrewd harmonizing.
* * *
“The Johnny Cash of Painting,” the writer Jim Reed tagged Andy Friedman. Onstage, the Brooklyn-based maverick visual artist and songwriter accompanies his original songs with his band, The Other Failures, and projections of his paintings, drawings, and photographs.
Friedman, 31, has been relentlessly touring the nation since 2002, when the artist traded a coveted day job in the Editorial Department at The New Yorker magazine for a life on the road. Critics nationwide quickly dubbed his one-man “slideshow poetry” performance as “the coolest, most interesting show to come around in a long time.” (Good Times) Alone on stage, Friedman accompanied his projections only with a series of spoken lyrics and monologue. By Autumn 2004, the artist learned guitar and began singing his lyrics, forming a band and letting his pictures and songs interact in a countrified, music-art-poetry hybrid he calls “Art Country.”
"Live at the Bowery Poetry Club" is Friedman’s third release but first CD, now available on City Salvage Records, the label and publishing house founded by the artist in 2001. Recorded on the final night of a seven-week run at the eclectic club and poetry venue owned by visionary performance-poet Bob Holman in July 2005, the disc finds this ever-evolving, challenging, and pioneering artist reinterpreting his visual works, poems and “slideshow poetry” monologues from his first two books (2001’s “Drawings & Other Failures” and 2003’s “Future Blues”) and four years on the road as song.
An artist who places the value of meaning over method, the songs on "Live" present an honest writer using his art to grapple with obstacles of creativity, love and wanderlust along the way. In “Things You Can Do For Free,” Friedman sings “There are plenty of things you can do at no cost/Miss a bus or take a walk till your lost.” In “Middletown," the only song on "Live" based on pencil drawings and photos yet to be published, Friedman wrestles with his muse, caught between the urge to experience life as it happens or make art about it. “If a poet spends each rainstorm with a pen and a smoke,” he sings, “he won’t know rainstorm from a hard-boiled egg.”
"Live at the Bowery Poery Club" is an adventurous album by a pioneering thinker and performer who shatters the perceived boundaries that exist between art, music, poetry, performance and life.
--written by ANDY WEST with RONALD T. COSOLETO
reviews
Please log in to review this album.
History / Future
author: A Very Rich PersonUndeniably derivative of Merle, Hank, and Doc. Undeniably derivative of Henri, Pablo, and Jackson. Undeniably original.
Inspiring
author: Anthony EI played the cd for a friend recently. She didn't quite get it, which really confused me. I tried to tell her that there was real honesty going on here (plus an awesome backing band). I said that she needed to listen harder and I told her that she needed to think about all the times she didn't understand what was happening in whatever scene she was into. Sounds dramatic, eh? It was! It is! As a painter myself, hearing Mr. Friedman bitching at his own inhibitions is truly inspiring.
it kills!
author: leora brownenot recommended for accountants!
I can't imagine a better cd to take on a road trip.
author: keet marsThe sun was going down over the Rockies, dusk coming on slow. Coral sky bleeding blues and greens--soon purple. Long way to Laramie. I lit up the last of my bag, slipped "Live at Bowery" into the stereo, and for the next hour was transported. Lost in the rugged poetry and soaring pedal steel. The sandpaper chants. The anodyne of Natalia. These werent words. They were incantations, recreating the flight of the moth to the flame, the young artists trajectory. Telling you why it just had to go. All of it. Friedman might have been born in Long Island, but his true home is the shit-kicking backwoods of Mississippi.
Dear Stick! What a CD!
author: Mike SibioThe perfect CD to listen to while either checking badges at the pool, or gettin sued by a lifetime resident. Hopefully more great tunes to come from this kid whos house burned down.