Album Notes

The Dan Emery Mystery band is as whacked as you can get when you're totally serious.

Dan Emery was raised on a farm in rural Idaho and met the guitar at a callow age. He moved to New York City to be a rock musician, and after a quick flurry of events ended up playing all the local clubs and running sound at the Sidewalk Cafe, home of Anti-folk, in the heart of the East Village. On Sunday nights Dan hosted a rambling and variable gathering of musicians in a jam circle which was listed in the papers as Dan Emery + Mystery Band. The name became a Name, and the mystery band became the Mystery Band.

So picture this: Ben Folds wakes up one morning heading a group called Nirvana. No drugs, no guns, no tragic deaths, and everybody lives happily ever after. That captures some of the picture. The Dan Emery Mystery Band is most often likened to Jonathan Richman, Beck, Ben Folds, the Violent Femmes, Arlo Guthrie and more; Dan is fond of pointing out that they don't actually sound like any of these artists, but that's the way of the world. What they have in common is a wry and canny take on Life In These Strange Days.

On this album you'll hear Dan's songs of life and cities and the people whirling in them: aperock, he calls it, in an evolutionary sense more than a hairy one. Short-wave radio, Wurlitzer organ, bass and drums round out the Mystery Band sound, under the watchful ears of producer Nathan Rosenberg (who owns a gold record for his work with Poe on Atlantic Records).

The Dan Emery Mystery Band is a regular fixture at the CMJ Music Marathon in New York, and plays colleges and clubs around the region and beyond. "Natural Selection" is being promoted to college and open-format commercial radio nationwide in the spring and summer of 2001.

Make Mine Mystery.