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Interview: Eight Years Down: Cary Brothers on His Long-Awaited Return

Cary Bothers
Craig Manning

As listeners, we typically assume that a debut album is an artist’s mission statement. Simply put, an artist’s first album is supposed to establish what that person or band sounds like. It’s supposed to lay the foundations for the rest of their career and give listeners some idea of what to expect later on down the road. But what happens when a debut album proves to be an anomaly? When the first record establishes a sonic identity that the artist doesn’t want to chase on future releases?

For more than a decade now, Cary Brothers has been asking precisely that question.

Brothers burst onto the scene in 2004, with a December release called All the Rage. It wasn’t until the next year, though, that he got his big break, thanks in large part to the Garden State soundtrack. Brothers’ beloved contribution, the song “Blue Eyes,” had already been a Hotel Café favorite when Zach Braff scooped it up for his quirky coming-of-age dramedy. Garden State took the song and immortalized it for listeners and movie fans who were of a certain age at the time. While the song gave Brothers the kind of boost that just about any songwriter would kill for, though, it also meant that he got the musical version of typecast. “Blue Eyes” was a singer-songwriter song, and Brothers’ full-length debut, 2007’s Who You Are, was a singer-songwriter album. You could hardly blame early Cary Brothers fans for making the assumption that he was an acoustic singer-songwriter, period.

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Bohemians – “Start Creating” (Video Premiere)

Bohemians
Jason Tate

Today we’ve got the premiere of the new video for “Start Creating” from the band Bohemians. The band reminds me a little bit of Bad Suns mixed with Spitalfield-like melodies. It’s an upbeat and relaxed sound. Describing the video the band said:

We loved the idea of a video where the audience sees from the perspective of a piece of art, as if it were staring back and studying it’s creator and the people who interact with it. We’re quite closely acquainted with the feeling of putting our work out into the world and wondering how the folks who receive it react. So this video became the literal manifestation of that curiosity.

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The Second Anniversary of Chorus.fm

Jason Tate

Today marks the second anniversary of Chorus.fm. Sometimes it feels like the world is stuck in slow motion with so much news and chaos surrounding us and the days making the weeks feel like months. But then I also can’t figure out where the last two years went. It feels like it was just yesterday that I was saying goodbye to AbsolutePunk.net, and hoping that some readers would follow me here to Chorus. I want to thank all of you that have been reading the website the past two years. I’m finally coming to the point where I don’t feel like everything I’ve done has been defined by AP.net, and where what I’m doing now, this website, this community, can be something that at the very least fulfills me in a way that AbsolutePunk never really could. It’s like looking at pictures of what you wore in high-school and wanting to yell through time to buy clothes that fit. Chorus.fm feels like it fits me. And every day I feel lucky that it’s something that I get to do. So, thank you, all of you. Especially those that have become supporters and helped make this website everything that it is.

Here’s a run down some of the numbers from the last 12 months:

  • 4,257 new articles posted on the main site. (9,402 total.)
  • 1,420,222 words have been published on Chorus.1
  • 1,002,023 new forum posts. (1,897,160 total.)
  • 47,191 new registered accounts. (81,957 total.)
  • 1,779,477 likes given out since last April.
  • 5,106 private message sent per month (average).

I’ve got a lot of things planned for this year. The goal is to improve the website and try some new things. As always, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, email, or in the forums with thoughts, ideas, or concerns about the website. And if you like what we’re doing, please give our supporter options a look. If you can swing $3 a month to help us out, it would mean the world to me. It’s with the support of readers like you that we’re able to keep publishing and stay online.

  1. I’m using a new tool to calculate the number of words published this year. It should be more accurate going forward. 730,299 of these words were written by me.↩

Interview: Matt Politoski of Animal Flag

Animal Flag
Zac Djamoos

I wrote about Animal Flag at the beginning of the year for our most anticipated albums of 2018 and predicted their new album being “a stunner.” Now they’ve announced that album – it’s called Void Ripper and it comes out on April 13 via Flower Girl and Triple Crown Records – and I can assure you it’s a stunner indeed. I recently had the pleasure of speaking to frontman Matt Politoski about the writing of the record and the break away from Christianity that inspired it.

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Pale Houses – “Hideaway” (Song Premiere)

Pale Horses
Jason Tate

Today I’m happy to bring you the premiere of the new Pale Houses song, “Hideaway.” You can stream the track below. The song comes from the band’s upcoming album, Songs of the Isolation, which is due out on March 30th. If you like what you hear, pre-orders are now up. Lead singer, Aaron Robinson, had this to say about the dreamy rock song:

This was the first song we wrote for this record.  It’s sonically pretty different than much of the EP, but it set the tone for how these songs would come together live.  It’s a song about a desperate need to spontaneously get away from everything and reset.

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