Possibly 4th Street is a regular SOTC feature in which Rob Trucks invites musicians to play songs somewhere, anywhere, in the five-borough public. Previously, Steve Wynn performed in a dog run and The Black Lips played a couple songs in Sara Roosevelt Park. Today, we've got the gorgeously plaintive Phosphorescent in Grand Ferry Park.

photo by Camille Dodero

Possibly 4th Street: Phosphorescent

Volume I, Issue Five

Who: Phosphorescent, the recording name of Bed-Stuy resident Matthew Houck

Who Phosphorescent is today, October 4th: Matthew Houck, Ben McConnell, Jeff Bailey, Scott Stapleton, and Elizabeth Barfield

When: About six o’clock on Thursday evening

Where: Grand Ferry Park along the East River shore, in Williamsburg

Songs Played: "Wolves" (scroll for MP3), "Be Dark Night"

A book Matthew Houck has read at least twice:
“Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (by Denis Johnson)”

A movie he’s seen at least three times:
Mulholland Drive.

The album he’s listened to more than any other in his life:
Another Side of Bob Dylan.

The circumstances under which he wrote “Wolves,” the highlight of Phosphorescent's recently released Pride:
“It was specific about . . . . I was living with a girl and, and it was, something about, something about . . . . We had talked about some stuff and kind of . . . . I don’t know. It’s hard to know exactly what really, but it’s something about . . . .”

Was this morning? Afternoon? At night?
“Morning, morning. Morning with that one.”

Okay, so you’d been talking about some stuff . . .
“Well, maybe not talking about some stuff. Maybe going through some stuff, and it was all just kind of how there was always . . . . I mean, you know, it’s pretty just metaphorical, pretty directly metaphorical on purpose to where it’s not too specific where you can kind of apply whatever you want to it, I hope.”

Is she in the room when you write it?
“No.”

You have to leave the room that she’s in in order to write it.
“I do.”

But she's awake.
“She’s awake.”

More about "Wolves":
It's the first song Houck wrote upon arriving in New York and the only song (so far) that he's written on ukulele. The orchestration is sparse (a bass drum here, an acoustic guitar there), though still a sturdy bedrock for layer upon layer of voices (yea verily it's a 21st-century Gregorian chant by way of Brooklyn), thin like a cabin window without insulation, vulnerable, and hauntingly transparent. What remains is something tenuous, transforming and, in just the right light (say, sundown on the East River), resoundingly timeless.

DOWNLOAD
Phosphorescent, "Wolves (Live on the East River Shore)" (MP3)

Phosphorescent plays Silent Barn this Friday November 9 (myspace.com/silentbarn) and the Cake Shop November 10 (cake-shop.com)

photo by Camille Dodero

Matthew Houck
photo by Rob Trucks

For video of Phosphorescent performing "Wolves" on the East River shore, click below on that "read on" link. For further discourse on this October afternoon, consult the piece that also ran in print over here.

Matthew Houck and Elizabeth Barfield
photo by Rob Trucks

PREVIOUSLY
The Black Lips in Sara Roosevelt Park
Steve Wynn in a Dog Run

Possibly 4th Street is a regular SOTC feature in which writer Rob Trucks invites musicians he likes to play anywhere, somewhere, in public. Last week, he brought you a songwriter who brought us to a dog run. This week, we bring you a couple of "fucked-up, Atlanta-bred, corn-fed Pucks" singing about a woman who gave them STDs.

photo by Rob Trucks

Possibly 4th Street: Black Lips

I’m downstairs at the Bowery Ballroom with Jared Swilley, bassist/vocalist of the Black Lips. We’ve just returned from Sara D. Roosevelt Park where Jared and Joe Bradley, the only two members of Black Lips who don’t play guitar onstage, took out acoustics and strummed a few songs. We're near the end of our interview when Jared asks if he can take one of his answers back. The reason: “Because my dad might read this.”

[Exclusive Black Lips MP3 after the jump]

Jared’s dad is Bishop Jim Earl Swilley, founding pastor of the Church in the Now in Conyers, Georgia, a man recently recognized by no less than the Georgia State Legislature for his “leadership” of a “cutting edge, multicultural, interdenominational church . . . with a life-changing message of restoration, the nowness of God, and a progressive vision for the future.” Bishop Swilley is yet another rung in a long, long ladder of Swilleys called into the ministry. According to the Bishop’s son, the Swilleys of Georgia have been ministers “probably since they got off the boat in Savannah or Brunswick.”

And since parents are parents, regardless of whether or not they work on Sunday, Jared’s desire to exorcise the part of our discussion dealing with a certainly private and likely illegal act is understandable. Until you realize that he and his bandmates have been documented—over and over and over, in fact—participating in onstage behavior that is much, much worse.

For a goodly part of the Black Lips career, the group’s live shows have been better known more for what the band did than what the band played. So surely Bishop Swilley has read of the multiple offerings of bodily excretions made by his son’s band. For starters, vomit and spit and piss (oh my). Some of which ends up on the floor, some on the audience.

The Lips’ most infamous New York show took place in February 2006. Opening for Wolfmother at the Mercury Lounge, the band engaged in at least one onstage makeout session and one instance of a Black Lip (guitarist/vocalist Cole Alexander) urinating into his own mouth before discharging his discharge onto the audience. That the band refused to end their set even after the PA was cut off and the lights turned on was, of course, mere icing on an unbelievably disgusting cake.

The performance was sufficiently shocking to get the Lips banned, at least for a time, from all Bowery Presents facilities. But as they say, money talks and bullshit walks (or gets thrown on the audience), because in less than five hours after Jared Swilley asks me to edit and excise a certain part of our talk, his band will play to a sold-out house here at the previously enraged promoter’s mothership, the Bowery Ballroom.

Something else for Bishop Swilley to read about.

EXCLUSIVE BLACK LIPS COVER
Black Lips, "Blue Yodel (Live at Sara D. Roosevelt Park)" (MP3)

Possibly 4th Street

Who: Black Lips bassist Jared Swilley and drummer Joe Bradley

When: Tuesday evening, September 18th

Where: The playground within Sara D. Roosevelt Park between Rivington and Stanton.

Songs Performed: "Bad Kids," "Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah," "T for Texas (Lips Lyrical Remix)"

Who the hell is Sara D. Roosevelt?
Sara Delano Roosevelt was the mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her only child. She died at the age of 86, three months to the day before Pearl Harbor was bombed. The park, which stretches from East Houston to Canal, was dedicated in 1934, two years after her son was first elected President.

A really strong case for our inaugural Band That Busked The Furthest Award:
“Originally it was supposed to be like we were going to do like Palestine versus Israel. Like where’s better to busk? But we never ended up having time to busk in Jerusalem. But we just thought it would be unfair if we went over there and only played in Israel.

“Unfortunately I don’t think there’s any rock clubs in the West Bank, so we just had to take it to the streets. And actually it was really well received. I was kind of nervous because the first taxi driver we saw, he like said we were fucked, but we were with some locals and a bunch of kids came out and people, they brought us tea and gave us kaffirs. ‘Johnny B. Goode’ was the only song they recognized. We started doing it and they started singing a Hamas chant along to the tune of ‘Johnny B. Goode.’”

The “most random thing” Swilley saw in Palestine:
“We did see [the Southern fast-food joint] Checkers in the West Bank, which was really weird. Oh, and we also saw Flipper graffiti inside. It was on the wall, like on the Palestinian side of the wall.”

Previous busking experience:
“We used to do it on tour to subsidize not getting paid from clubs. The first five plus years of touring we were always kind of in the red as far as like money. Actually a lot of times we would make more money busking outside of a show than we would at the actual show.”

A spooky rung in the Swilley’s ministerial ladder:
“Actually my great-grandpa, they called him The Walking Bible. He used to travel around in a wagon, like a horse-pulled wagon, all around Georgia. And since he was Pentecostal and spoke in tongues, people would think he was a snakehandler. And he used to have to drive with his brother who had like a shotgun. I heard all these tales. I mean, you know, I think they’re just old stories, but like one time a crowd of people came up and they said, ‘Hey Preacherman, here’s a snake,’ and they said he grabbed the snake in the air and it turned into like a stick and he broke it over his knee. And then one time like a mob came on him and he quoted some scripture and they all started fighting each other.”

One thing Jared Swilley says he's never done:
“Bought underwear.”

Couple weeks ago, we introduced Possibly 4th Street, a regular SOTC feature in which writer Rob Trucks invites musicians he likes to play anywhere, somewhere, in public. So far, he's messed around with the Fiery Furnaces and Oakley Hall, but here's the real thing: a songwriter who brought us to a dog run. Thank God for a man who raises the stakes.

photo by Rob Trucks

EXCLUSIVE DOWNLOAD
Steve Wynn, "Bruises (Live at Dog Run 105)" (MP3)

Possibly 4th Street: Steve Wynn

Steve Wynn walks down the stairs from 103rd Street and Riverside Drive. In between the road and the Hudson River, I’ve taken over a park bench—strewn backpack, camera, recording equipment and frozen Mountain Dew—just south of the Hudson Beach Club watering hole and Dog Run 105, one of about a hundred benches in Riverside Park that run parallel to the river itself.

The pathway is picturesque, like a scaled-down version of the Great Mall in Central Park. You know, the tree-lined, park bench-lined avenue that got its close-up in Kramer vs. Kramer.

“So where do you want to do this thing?” I ask Wynn. As in, “Which of these many, many park benches would you like to perform on, under, in front of, or next to?”

Because Riverside Park was Steve’s idea.

“The dog run,” he says.

“Over by the dog run?”

“No, in the dog run,” he says.

Which is just about the best idea I’ve heard in weeks.

Steve Wynn does "Kerosene Man" in a dog park

To place properly the career of Steve Wynn (the guitarist, not the Vegas hotel magnate who put his elbow through Picasso’s Le Rêve) you have to go back to the early '80s, when he, a very young man, fled Davis, California for Los Angeles and brought together the Dream Syndicate. As frontman (read: lead singer, guitarist and primary songwriter), Wynn became the official face of the Paisley Underground, a southern California-based grouping of bands like the Rain Parade, the Three O'Clock, and Game Theory, all propelling a tumultuous tangle of Velvet Underground cool and L.A. (think Chinatown and the novels of Steve Erickson) dark.

The Syndicate's singular debut, 1982's Days of Wine and Roses—especially lead track "Tell Me When It's Over" with its hypnotically simplistic guitar lead—remains a bold and crucial marker on the alt-rock growth chart, beloved long after after the Syndicate disbanded in 1989.

Since then Steve has released numerous solo albums and stepped into side projects like Danny & Dusty and Gutterball before latching onto the Miracle 3, his band of the past seven years and, give or take, seven hundred shows. And yet despite three Miracle albums (all recorded in Tucson, incidentally) in which Wynn successfully searched for a sound he once proclaimed as "loud and raw and huge and broken," he is still best known for Days of Wine and Roses, an album he recorded when he was all of 22.

But something must’ve changed in that past quarter-century, because cool and dark rarely translate as uninhibited—a quality, I assume, one must possess to willingly strap on an acoustic and step inside a mewling maelstrom of Upper West Side mutts.

"I live close to here," says Wynn. "Actually I thought of a lot of different places to do it, and I chose a friendly place, a place where I feel comfortable. And I wanted to do it down here because I come down to this park a lot, but my girlfriend, who's also my drummer, Linda, she said, 'Do it in the dog run.' Because we'll come down and we’ll stand at the fence and watch the dog run for hours. It's like watching Congress. There's a whole political scene in there. You don't even have to go to the movies. It’s all going on in there. And so I figured I would just throw myself into the mix.”

Wynn's side project Danny & Dusty will play the Bowery Ballroom, New York City on January 12, 2008.

photo by Rob Trucks

DOWNLOAD
Steve Wynn, "There Will Come a Day (Live at Dog Run 105)" (MP3)
Steve Wynn, "Kerosene Man (Live at Dog Run 105)" (MP3)

Volume I, Issue Three

Who:
Steve Wynn, most recently of Steve Wynn and the Miracle 3

When:
Around 5:30 on Thursday afternoon, September 20th

Where:
Dog Run 105, just across the cart path from the Hudson Beach Café

Where Steve Wynn was headed a mere five days later:
Slovenia.

What the hell?
“I’m going to Slovenia because Chris Eckman, who is the guitarist/singer/producer of The Walkabouts, lives there. He married a Slovenian woman about five years ago. He’s a really great producer and I’ve always wanted to work with him but we both tour all the time. We tour the same circuits so we’re in the same clubs passing messages to each other through other people, and finally our schedules matched up so I’m going to go out there on his turf to work with him and kind of pick his brain about how he does stuff.

“I’m going over there with a bunch of songs I’ve written, some things we’ve written together, but I’m really hoping to write the whole album there. I like the idea of getting off the plane and it starts right then. To write everything, sing everything, play everything in those three weeks and come home with a record.

“I’ve made several records where I go to a city and throw myself into somebody else’s scene, you know, whether it’s eating the food, walking the streets or playing with musicians. I did that with Gutterball in Richmond about ten years ago. I did it in Boston about eight or nine years ago, and that always works well for me. If I go somewhere new and have new things hit me in the face, I get ideas.”

And the recording project after that:
“I’m doing a baseball record. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, a record entirely about baseball, touting specific players or incidents, things like that. I’ve been talking about this for a long time now, thinking of ways to do it, and I met up with Scott McCaughey from R.E.M., Young Fresh Fellows, the Minus Five. We met up about half a year ago and I told him about it and it turns out he’s as big a baseball fan as I am and he flipped out, so we’re going to get together, Scott and myself and Peter Buck and Linda (Miracle 3 drummer Pitmon), and do the record in December in Portland because Peter’s got a studio there. It’s pretty convenient. And again, we’re going to write a lot on our own before we get together and then collaborate once we’re there. I’ll probably come back from Slovenia and watch the World Series and write during the entire Series.”

And the one after that:
“And the third is a new record with the Miracle 3, my band, my band of the last seven years. We’re going to do a record together in Richmond in January.”

Steve Wynn’s favorite baseball team when he lived in Los Angeles and played with Dream Syndicate:
The Los Angeles Dodgers. (Mention Fernando Valenzuela and there’s a good chance Wynn might get all misty-eyed for his lost youth.)

Steve Wynn’s favorite baseball team since he moved to New York 15 years ago:
The New York Yankees. (That ain’t right. That ain’t right at all).

Steve Wynn’s one previous busking experience:
“I was up in Boston like in ’83, probably ’84, a long time ago, and I was staying at somebody’s house. I was hanging out at The Rat and everybody split. Everyone thought that somebody else was supposed to take me back to this place. Everyone left thinking I was covered. I was there by myself, pretty drunk. So I went out. I had no money. I had like literally no money. I spent it on beer or whatever. I went out into Kenmore Square and busked. I had my guitar with me. I played an acoustic show. I had just finished an acoustic show that night and I went out and busked in Kenmore Square and got cab fare. It was the strongest connection I ever had between playing music and earning a living in my life. You know, it was the most concrete example. I stood out here and played for cab fare and it worked.”

Now that it’s over, a very nice theory on the difference between playing in a club and a dog run:
“You know, there’s a certain suspension of disbelief when you’re in a club. I’ve always thought it was really funny that you go into a club, you play a show and you’re standing on a higher platform than the audience. You’re immediately looking down at them. You’re immediately put into a place where everyone recognizes you as the focus of the evening. So you’ve already got things in your favor. Then you’ve got a PA making you really loud. Things are more in your favor. Then you’ve got lights making you all lit up in a nice way, hopefully. So everything’s like made to take you out of any kind of belief that you’re just like some other guy who can play a guitar, you know, and stand in front of people.

“And it is intimidating to play either out in a dog run, or I sometimes play in a record store where there’s no PA and you’re standing on the floor. Or even playing clubs sometimes that don’t have a stage. Once you start stripping away all the artifice, you kind of have to remind yourself why people even bother paying attention to you. And I kind of like it. I like playing the dog run. Not that anyone’s paying attention, but I figure, if I feel comfortable doing this here, if I feel comfortable playing these songs like I have a reason to be playing them, and if they sound halfway decent here, I guess I’m doing the right thing.”

Steve Wynn does "There Will Come a Day" in a dog park

PREVIOUSLY
Possibly 4th Street #2: Oakley Hall
the Fiery Furnaces

Couple days ago, we attempted to explain Possibly 4th Street, this new feature here at Sound of the City, but here's the abridged version. Writer Rob Trucks invites musicians that he likes to play songs somewhere, anywhere, in public. More often than not, your Sound of the City emcee tags along to capture the proceedings with a box of taffy and a Fisher Price videocamera. Once a week, we dump everything here. The really abridged version: free Oakley Hall live in Union Square MP3 below!

P.S. Oakley Hall headlines the Bowery Ballroom on Saturday, October 13. Tickets available here.

photo by Rob Trucks

DOWNLOAD
Oakley Hall, "No Dreams" (Busking in Union Square) (MP3)

Possibly 4th Street: Oakley Hall

Excellent psych-country band plays free public mini-set. Only one (little) person notices.

On a late summer afternoon, dulcet duo Rachel Cox and Patrick Sullivan of Oakley Hall are stationed just outside the subway entrance in the southwest corner of New York City's Union Square. They are, in fact, busking. As in, both are singing high and hard, without amplification, and Patrick is playing guitar with his case open, in case someone, anyone, might care to contribute.

"We'd both done it in varying degrees in earlier parts of our lives," Sullivan admits, "but it was kind of when Rachel was joining Oakley Hall that we started doing it around to make extra money because neither of us had any."

Not that the size of the band's bank account has grown much. In less than a week from this August afternoon, the Oakleys will embark on a five-week North American tour, the longest of their career. But until then, Cox, who not only works a day job five days a week but a night job on the other two, will be doing whatever she can to hoard the cash.

"I'm working all the way up until we leave," she says. "I have to. We are definitely not rich."

And yet today is a response to a request, a mere stretching of relatively dormant street-performance muscles. On a wistfully warm summer day, the pair stays above ground (albeit in the shade of the subway awning), while their previous monetary success came underground, on subway platforms.

"People really liked it down there," Cox says, "because our harmonies would sort of echo. Except when the train was coming."

Besides the obvious practice time, Cox and Sullivan's underground busking also helped in other ways. While eschewing (seriously) categorizations like alt-country and (God forbid) jam band, Oakley Hall is appropriately proud of its traditional, sweeter-than-sugar harmonies over what might be best described as an underlying maelstrom of modern melody, as if the '70s act America had stayed home with their whiskey and their weed (and maybe a clanging trash can or two), rather than trying to cross an unbelievably dry, sandy place upon an unnamed horse.

"Instead of drums, it's like a subway train going by," Sullivan says. "I think one thing that's always difficult for us is finding a harmony when there's a lot of other stuff going on, which is kind of what Oakley Hall is."

Who:
Patrick Sullivan and Rachel Cox of Oakley Hall

When:
Just about three p.m. on Friday, August 31st

Where:
In the shade of the subway awning in the southwest corner of Union Square Park

A Patrick Sullivan theory about busking in the subway:
“The thing about the subway is, you’re always competing with trains. There’s more traffic that goes by you, but you only have to play like two songs, so you can just keep recycling.”

A Patrick Sullivan theory about busking in Union Square versus Wall Street:
“I’ve done it on Wall Street a couple times and it sucks down there. Like, I think I was down there in the middle of the day and it’s just a ghost town. It’s only good at like, you know, rush hour, but even then it’s not that good because it’s just way too crowded.
“I think [Union Square] is good because people are just chilling, and when you play here people actually stop and listen. They're like not on their way somewhere.”

One more Patrick Sullivan theory pertaining to busking:
“I think even just singing together, as opposed to singing alone, works better. You might not make more money but people are much more interested in something different, whether it’s harmonies or a different type of instrument or something odd about the act. Whereas I think if you just go into the subway where like you’re a dude with an acoustic guitar or a girl with just your acoustic guitar and it’s you alone it’s not as much of a hook.”

According to Rachel Cox, one reason you shouldn’t wear prom gloves while busking in Seattle, where she spent time while "traveling around":
“I wore these electric blue prom gloves and I cut the fingers out and this one guy approached me and he was going to give me some money. I actually got a pretty good response. But I’d be out there for like several hours a day. But one guy came up and said he wanted to make sure I wasn’t shooting up or doing drugs because he didn’t want to give me money [if I was]. Like he thought I was doing drugs or something and I was like, ‘No, I’m not. I’m really just out here playing music.’”

Other stuff Rachel learned about busking in Seattle:
“Actually you have to go get a permit from the state. And it’s actually a welcome thing. They have like little music notes and you have to stand, like they actually have places you have to stand on the little music notes. There’s a guy that lived right in that area. It was like down by the water where they have the big market and they have the fish and all that stuff. And he lived right there and he would roll his piano out onto this music note that was right on the corner from his apartment and play the piano. But like it was pretty regulated there. It was part of a touristy thing.”

One thing that Patrick has never ever done:
“Bowled naked.”

Something that Rachel has done once and one time only:
“I had sex in a theater.”

A book that Patrick has read at least twice:
"Catch-22"

A movie Rachel has seen at least three times:
“Wild Blue Yonder by Werner Herzog.”

The net distance between Oakley Hall’s first Fall tour stop (Tuesday, September 4th at Maxwell’s in Hoboken) and their last (this Saturday, October 13th at the Bowery Ballroom on Delancey):
4.7 miles

PREVIOUSLY
Possibly 4th Street: Fiery Furnaces
Rob Harvilla on Oakley Hall

Today we introduce a regular Sound of the City feature in which one nostalgic Alabaman invites musicians he likes to play a song publicly somewhere, anywhere, in the five boroughs. Very often, this intrepid Southerner drags along yr unwitting blog host to document the proceedings with the departmental equipment—some iodine vapors, a cell-phone camera, and a stick of chewing gum. (Daguerreotype 2.0!)

Possibly 4th Street's inaugural subject is Matthew Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces—who actually didn't play a note for us, but instead revealed the secrets of his songwriting process. The print thingy came out last week, but we saved the odds and ends for today, the release date of the band's most recent opus, Widow City. Expect to see more of this lo-fi shit every week. In fact, brace yrself for another installment (this time with music) in two days.

Matthew Friedberger in Long Island City; photo by yr SOTC host Camille Dodero

Possibly 4th Street: The Fiery Furnaces

by Rob Trucks

“We begin . . .”
Yes, we begin.

Call this little excursion the bride of busking (yes, it could be the groom, cousin or ex-girlfriend of busking, but we like alliteration). Something close, but not quite reaching, the proverbial hand-rolled product of Cuba.

Let us ‘splain, Lucy.

The sport of busking has a long and storied, if ill-documented history—if there is a definitive, encompassing work on the subject, we’ve yet to run across it. In those halcyon, pre-You Tube days, busking stood as a simultaneously open, yet shady (read: illegal), act. An occasionally romantic, if ofttimes necessary endeavor for young, struggling musicians. Yep, traveling troubadours took up subway and sidewalk positions in hopes of a little pocket change, some much-needed meal money, or perhaps the musical equivalent of Lana Turner’s rumored discovery at Schwab’s—long before MySpace was a gleam in Rupert Murdoch’s eye.

Dylan, we assume, busked upon his arrival in this city. (How could he not since all of his heroes and cronies partook? Though Michael Gray’s Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, for one, makes no mention.) And rumor has it that Sir Paul McCartney, well past fashionably late in his career (circa Give My Regards to Broad Street if the stories are true) donned a disguise and took to the streets of London with a left-handed six-string. So did Sting, another British bassist (though his guitar was a righty and his disguise was supposedly just a simple hat pulled low).

Joe Strummer, in his pre-punk, hippie days, also busked in London to earn much-needed cash, not only for himself but his fellow squatters. And in a rare dash of documented street performance, Neil Young busked in Glasgow shortly before a scheduled appearance in 1976.

Of course, Europe has always served as a more accepting setting for such activities. Madeleine Peyroux, now a resident of New York, began her showbiz career as a hat-passer on the east side of the Atlantic before touring Old World streets as a singer with the famed (by busking standards) Lost Wandering Blues & Jazz Band.

Closer to home (but not by much), Michelle Shocked, back when she was still known as Michelle Johnston, played mandolin with a street band out in California. And, as the story goes, the Violent Femmes were discovered by late Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott while busking on the sidewalks of their Milwaukee motherland.

You can probably add a half-dozen or so more names yourself (Beck!), so suffice to say that a whole bunch of famous musicians, at one time or another, grabbed their guitar (or other instrument of choice) and took to the street to seek their respective fortune.

But you just don’t see that (or hear that or hear about that) so much anymore. At least not from anyone you’d cross the street to hear. And we miss it some.

We first thought to try and rekindle that time-honored act of busking by inviting musicians outside, out in the street, as it were, to play some songs, pass the hat, see if anyone noticed. Certainly the Village scene of nearly fifty years ago gives us some historical, as well as local, precedent. But honestly, the money aspect, for once, doesn’t matter here. We're much more interested in engaging musicians we like—the young and the (relatively) old, the famous and the not-so—in a different way. And we’re adaptable, if not flexible. So if that means walking through western Queens with Matthew Friedberger (half of our hometown Fiery Furnaces) as he shows us his first non-Brooklyn apartment, then that’s fine and dandy.

But most of the time musicians will play. And we’ll listen and we’ll talk and we’ll document it with some particularly shitty equipment (at least until we get that advance on our allowance) so you’ll know we’re not trying to be all competitive and stuff.

Here 'tis.

VOLUME 1, EDITION 1

The Fiery Furnaces

Who:
Matthew Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces

When:
Around four o’clock on the afternoon of September 7th

Where:
A small slice of western Queens, beginning at the Vernon-Jackson subway stop and ending at Gantry Plaza State Park

Why he brought us there:
“Because this is nearly in the middle of the five boroughs, this spot. I mean, it’s not geographically, but because this is so close to Manhattan this is a better middle point of the five boroughs. It’s good to be in an outer borough.”

A theory about New York:
“You know, in New York, people are friendly. You can talk to people. But New York is also the best place to be solitary in the country, you know. Because if you’re living in a really rural area, people know who you are, people know what you’re doing. I think there’s a lot of people that come to the city and they go to place and then when the person starts to know their name and know what they usually buy, they won’t go there. There’s a lot of that, and I’m very sympathetic to that kind of thing.”

One more theory about New York, with a side of self-analysis:
“I’d always been a quitter and a failure-type person, and so I came here to just sort of quit and fail on a bigger stage, I guess.”

Why the Fiery Furnaces’ new album is entitled Widow City:
“It’s a combination of everything. Widow City. It sounds like a good English phrase. It looks good with the double Ws. It’s nice that city is kind of often, it used to be a slang intensifier, you know. Bummer City and stuff like that. But the main reason I wanted to call it Widow City was it means that the record is W.C. You know, water closet, toilet.”

Matthew Friedberger answers one question: