My dad (a terrific whistler) would proudly wear his cub t-shirt and loved it My grandmother and my aunt on my dad’s side of theįamily loved to perform… religious songs, show tunes, jazz standards… you name it, Mom also typed up songsĪssigned by my Vietnam Draft-Dodger hippie guitar teacher: Sounds of Silence, Tomĭooley, Where Have All The Flowers Gone? (all of which my 9-year-old self foundĮxtremely disturbing lyrically). Onstage at a Shakey’s Pizza during my eighth birthday party. Rendition of “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” -happened after I was literally pushed
I was a very shy child my first solo performance-a rousing In response to that, she always encouraged me to
Mom was a kid, a teacher told her she shouldn’t sing out loud, just mouth the words,īecause she had a “bad” voice. My family is super supportive of anything I choose to do, including music. Satisfied you? Do you recall the first time someone complimented your songs? Inspiration that kept you motivated and helped you dig deeper into songwriting as aįorm? When did you become aware that your songs were taking shape in a way that Were you showing your early songs to for feedback? Who/what were the sources of My firstĪnd truest instrument was and still is my brain… I write all my songs in my head.ĭid you have supportive friends and family as you embarked on a musical path? Who Until I was in a band… I jotted down Motel 6 on a memo pad at my secretarial job oneĪfternoon to give myself something to sing at Evaporators practice that night. I wrote poems from a super early age but didn’t start writing songs Name!) and I could identify and sing along with any tune that came on the radio within By 7 th grade, my best friend Jan Loverock (yes, actual In Grade 6, Miss Ramsay taught us all the lyrics for JesusĬhrist Superstar and we performed it publicly as a pantomime musical. Songs on an acoustic guitar and the whole class sang along: One Tin Soldier, Black & Sesame StreetĪnd Shirley Temple movies and The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour came first and I’veīeen a sucker for a catchy, peppy tune ever since. Musical influences on me were television, teachers and Top 40 radio. Words and they way they come together into sound and stories… The biggest early I’ve always loved music, always loved singing, always loved reading, always loved Influences that you based the early tunes on? Which instrument were you writing your Led you to begin writing your own songs? Did you have a specific reference or set of You introduced to music at an early age? How did you begin playing music, and what
While stretches of The Freed Man sound like the pot-addled meanderings of a semi-bohemian college sophomore with a little too much time on his hands, both Barlow and Gaffney display enough songcraft and imagination to show they were several cuts above most folks following a similar path, and the fact that the nerdy but confessional "Soulmate," the bare-bones pop of "Drifts on Thru," and a mock-hardcore cover of "Yellow Submarine" could peacefully coexist on the same album suggests Sebadoh's budget-minded eclecticism was reaping potent rewards right from the very start.Your songs have always suggested an innate fluency in the language of music - were However, on The Freed Man, while Barlow hardly sounds sunny most of the time, he was clearly able to embrace the playful side of the group's music, and Gaffney was more than willing to bring his fair share of goofiness into the formula add the periodic barrage of audio clips from television broadcasts, old children's records, and assorted noise, and you get the template for much of what would emerge in the "lo-fi revolution" (and like thousands of bands that would follow in Sebadoh's wake, much of The Freed Man was recorded in a college dorm room, with sounds from the adjoining rooms occasionally bleeding onto the tape). Not long after Sebadoh's The Freed Man first surfaced as a cassette-only release, Barlow was fired from Dinosaur Jr., and what was once his creative safety valve suddenly became his primary musical forum, and the rough, purposefully distorted textures of Sebadoh's primitive early work (recorded on inexpensive four-track cassette decks and then dubbed down to even cheesier tape) would become the early hallmark of their music, along with the rage, puzzlement, and melancholy that defined Barlow's lyrical world-view. When Lou Barlow first started recording as Sebadoh with his pal Eric Gaffney in 1986, he was still playing bass in Dinosaur Jr., and the group's early work practically defines the "side project syndrome" - since Barlow was already a member of another, more "serious" band at the same time, Sebadoh gave him the opportunity to be as silly, as cryptic, or as obsessively personal as he wished.
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