Album Notes

Hot Heels Records is a Chicago based rock and roll and beatfolk band who now tours with members Brandon Seyferth, Marty Grossman and Aaron Hanna.



Chicago. Sweet home before Alabama grabbed that title with its smudgy, hard hands and its affinity for putting aircraft on poles. Brandon Seyferth (pronounced ‘cypher’), a newcomer here, is releasing his first EP in March of ‘06 under the pseudo-band-name Hot Heels Records.

After coming off a stretch of being assigned to the fame-seeking dilettantes who crawl over the music and art scenes of so many cities, I’m suspicious of him even as he walks in to meet me at the diner he had suggested on the corner of California and Milwaukee. That suspicion was my fault, my bitterness, and I knew it. But through all the pop stars and television smothering that presses down on us I miss artists. Real artists. People with something to say aside from ‘hey everybody, look at me!’ I was hoping that truthfulness I heard in his music would carry over to the man, but I was waiting for him to fall short. A waitress interrupts our hellos with a flashed smile and a pot of coffee as Brandon sits down, keeping his leather jacket on, setting a collection of poems by Joseph Brodsky and John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” in the seat next to him. I wasn’t impressed that he brought books; a lot of people do that. I would learn over the next hour however that Mr. Seyferth is not a lot of people, and that I would not be disappointed.

He looks out the window. “It’s starting to get cold.” I knew enough about him already to know he is twenty-six, an award-winning poet at twenty-two. Nothing about how he looked told me that he had wandered China without a penny or a plan for more than a year, or that he had lived in an oxygen tent for the first part of his life. Nothing told me he had worked and traveled the U.S. East Coast with a modern carnival, but he had. I would find out later that night that seeing him perform makes his eclectic background stick out in a distinctly educated American way. Live, he’s part jazz hustle-bustle, part folk-poet, looks like Jack Kerouac or a worried James Dean, will play a punk-influenced song next to a Motown number and clap an immediacy on them with passionate and well-crafted words. His songs are catchy, relevant, mature, and he never lets you know what’s coming next.

“Yeah, there was snow on the ground yesterday,” I said. I spun my coffee cup in place and asked him about his childhood. He answered with a string of lies. I called him on it. He chuckled.

“I hadn’t been interested in folk music until I came to Chicago and saw some cats from the Old Town School [of Folk Music] playing standards at an open mic. I had been into soul, blues, Motown, rock, jazz before. Jazz taught me to improvise, soul taught me to make damned sure that improvisation didn’t make the night sterile. I picked up playing the harmonica on a rack about six months ago and started getting compared to Bob Dylan all the time. It’s something that seems to happen to everybody these days, but I liked that- took it as a compliment.” He laughs, “I figured I’d take it as a cue to start lying my ass off- seemed to help him, start of his career... there's a great line by Joseph Brodsky in one of his poems: "I proudly admit that my finest ideas are second-rate, may the future take them as trophies of my struggle against suffocation." I think my generation can relate to that- we live in a homeless land.”

Brandon pulls out a roll of quarters from his left jacket pocket to pay the bill, smirks at me. I chuckle, "let me get this one."


-James Venerky



EP CREDITS:
All songs by Brandon Seyferth except "These Days." "D Road" orchestrated as found poem by Brandon Seyferth. Ep produced by Jon Roberts, Brandon Seyferth.

Brandon Seyferth: vocals, guitar, harmonica, bass
Jon Roberts: percussion, bass, guitar


EP's FIRST RUN (now out of stock): http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/hotheelsrecs