Darkyr Sooner: Notes

What you see here: an actor's professional headshot of me, as I looked during the recording of Darkyr Sooner in 1999. In Manhattan, I had leave to go blonde (for a while), get a nose ring and a tattoo, and fall back down to 120 lbs., on a steady diet of Tostitos, Mike and Ikes, and black and white cookies. My diet, during my Manhattan sojourn, also included other things, of a more (shall we say) euphoric nature. Just like the song goes, I often found myself waitin' for my man, in Washington Square Park (or elsewhere). This is why, as I explained on Soundclick, so much of the Darkyr Sooner experience is in a personal blind spot or dead zone for me. During the months of the recording, I was sleeping on someone's couch in Alphabet City. I would take the subway up to Midtown, where Buttons Sound was (45th and 5th), with my guitar, in no shape to do anything but record.

The actor's professional headshot is no accident: I did some acting in Manhattan. I briefly joined 13th Street Rep, famous for Israel Horowitz and his piece Line, bounced around trying to get my plays produced, by Pure Pop, La Mama, and others, with little success. Paul Levin, who had some music biz cache as Tony Levin's nephew (Paul played bass too), was a godsend, and extended an extremely generous hand to me, making Buttons Sound for me a home away from home. The Darkyr Sooner sessions, beyond what's on the EP, also produced a second version of Riding the Waves, worth hearing. It's more spacy and less sharp than the single. 

The single, it turns out, was done in the fall of '99, when I was commuting to Manhattan from Philly, where I was already ensconced in Logan Square. The recordings which comprised Darkyr Sooner waited until, through Gair Marking of dev79, I could upload them to mp3.com, which at that point was also a surrogate or would-be label. The first pressing was done in 2000. That year, Paul Levin several times commuted to Philly from NYC to play bass for me at shows, at the Khyber and elsewhere. He also met many folks who were to be key participants in the Philly Free School, like Matt Stevenson, Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, and Gaetan Spurgin. Mary H. he met later.

Mary and Abby liked Darkyr Sooner. Yet the entire point of the title, with the inhering Nick Drake pun, is that the collection would have to wait for any generalized success. We've seen some of that now. Really, the EP is a testament to Paul's generosity to me, as an artist he had no obligation to assist or patronize. Paul saw that I had some good material, so he decided to help me put it down on tape. All the niggling contingent factors, the months I spent starving and couch surfing, don't matter much now. What we're left with is a document in pop music, of the Nineties transitioning, moving towards something else. That's how I see the Darkyr Sooner muse we channeled: the sound of transition.