BABY
Baby was a dream I had staring out over LA one day in 1999, shortly after my major relationships -band and girlfriend- of roughly a decade had both disintegrated. What if, I thought, the best POP music of my youth hadn’t given way to hair metal and grunge, but had continued to evolve in terms of song craft and technology, merging with the most interesting music and tech of RIGHT-EFFING-NOW (at the time, Pro Tools, so-called ‘Intelligent Dance Music’, nascent bubblegum pop, hip-hop production, and Electro clash) to form a bionic, hyper sexualized, semi-sophisticated, but above all brilliant new link in the (broken, in my opinion) chain of popular music that reaches both forward and backward at the same time, evoking a kind of bliss-y nostalgia for something that may or may not have actually existed in my then-waning youth, but that all of my favorite music seems to embody to the hilt, from Shangri-Las, to The Cars, to My Bloody Valentine. I had visions of stadiums singing along to Nursery-Rhyme-Trance, no boundary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, liberal quotes and samples from other music, and a return to melodies so pure they make you feel sun-stoned and in lust for the first time. Mind you, the wave of 80’s cannibalism (which has now lasted longer than the decade itself) hadn’t taken hold yet, and no one really knew how to use the internet to popularize themselves; hilariously, there was was still a sense that the music industry might return to what it had been for the better part of 40-years (this a nostalgia in and of itself, though not mine; let it burn, I thought) despite the facts on the ground, in the air, and online.
I didn’t have much going on at the time –maybe scoring one NY indie film per year- and I was neither married, nor a father, yet. So I had a LOT of time to forge this vision in the fires of my LES bachelor pad-cum-recording studio. I recorded so much music. I drove myself crazy. I collaborated with friends, writers (Jimmy Harry in particular, an invaluable friend who also co-wrote songs on ‘Lapland’, my first proper solo record), and generally purged myself of the 1990’s. Eventually, my wankings evolved into a full-fledged band, one that would become a real beast (when asked, I would define us as ‘Bubblegum Machine Music’) by the end of our activity, which spanned roughly from 2001-2004. The band was called BABY, and we played all over NYC; in fact, we only ever played NYC, save for one great B-more show somewhere in there.
