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 believed in his music. 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 Brandon is not a lot of people, and that I would not be disappointed.
In His Own Words: “I hadn’t been interested in folk music until I came to Chicago and saw some cats from the Old Town School playing standards at an open mic. I had been into soul, blues, motown, rockabilly, 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. I liked that- took it as a compliment. 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.”
Myspace: myspace.com/hotheelsrecords
For more information, visit their website: http://www.hotheelsrecords.com
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