Customer Reviews

Weary Things

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I was sitting in a restaurant in Red Hook Brooklyn and this CD came on. I wasn't sure if it was Steve Earle,so I asked the owner" Who is this Guy"?
I thought the sound was interesting both the play on words and the style of music. The owner said it was Andy Friedman. I sat and listened and I was really impressed. I got home and ordered this CD and I listened to it for quite a while. My favorite is Freddy's Backroom, doesn't everybody have or wish they had a bar in there neighborhood like Freddy's? Listening to him sing about the place he's been (The Land of the Sinclair Gas Station signs)etc etc. I could analyze this album,and go on and on. But what I can say is this Guy has a terrific style. I will buy the rest of his CD's and even go see him live.

Friedman's band seems to change every CD but far and away this is the best group he ever assembled. They transform the ages, sometimes sounding like an authentic western band banging around in a saloon. Other times hitting musical highs like the most talented jam bands (without the annoying noodling). They have a very, very, very, very tight ryhthm section that is very dangerous when you are listening to this in your car. Before you know it, you are going 80 miles per hour - if you're not careful. Just a fun CD. I hope Andy gets these boys together for a reunion.

I truly love this new CD by Andy Friedman and the Other Failures. It was hard for me to imagine anything as spectacular and moving as their first CD. "Taken Man" and yet, they've done it!
Listen not only to the music, but pay attention to the poetry of the lyrics. Friedman clearly has wonderful stories to share and personal emotions to offer up. The music is that perfect support for what is being expressed in each song. It's an experience worth your time. Buy it now, listen to it at once and enjoy it time and again. (You'll get more out of it with each listen.)

The mean streets of Brooklyn, NY are host to a thriving collection of hootenannies, hoedowns, jamborees, and scattershot oprys, jugfests and birthday bashes that must leave Manhattan city folk jealous of their outerborough cousins. Third-generation Brooklynite Andy Friedman found his way to the scene by drawing ever-widening musical circles around a background in visual arts. He started with recitations of spoken word lyrics placed alongside his paintings and drawings, added layers of improvisational musical accompaniment at his live shows, and slowly transformed his work with more traditional arrangements that span folk, country rock, twangy blues and studio touches. You can still hear the self-guided evolution in singing that reveals Friedman's narrative voice.

The title of this sophomore album, Weary Things, highlights the physical lethargy in Friedman's singing, as well as the mental wear of yearning for feelings and times that have aged out of a grown-up's life. He's tired, but it's often a good kind of tired: the tired born of life experience and coping with the curveballs thrown by the world. Friedman gazes longingly at the irresponsibility of youth and the grab-bag freedoms of a cross-country trip. He finds independence in touring but is subsumed by the road's isolation from family, declaring the former in the electric blues shuffle "Road Trippin'" and giving in to the latter on the acoustic apologia "Road Trippin' Daddy." Cleverly, the lyrics of both songs are the same but the arrangement and vocal tone rewrite their meaning.

Friedman's self-discovery offers a matured version of Jonathan Richman's childlike wonder. He's humorous without being jokey, arch without being ironic, like writer Nicholson Baker without the OCD. Well, mostly without the OCD, as the encyclopedic eulogy for his home base, Freddy's Backroom, stretches to eight-minutes of barstool detail. He writes philosophically of his background as a painter, and like many of the Brooklyn hillbillies, paints against the backdrop of their urban milieu. He's sufficiently self-assured to pierce his own hipness with the overly dramatic aside, "Hello young loners, wherever you are," and closes the album a rousing take of "The Friedman Holler" recorded live in Chicago. Friedman's sentimental, tough, sloppy, resilient, irascible, capricious and pragmatic, but most of all he's honest, and that honesty is the fuel of country songwriting whether it's ignited in the hills of Appalachians or the heights of Brooklyn. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]