New Yorker Cartoonist Turned Art-Country Crooner, Brooklyn's Own Andy Friedman & the Other Failures

He moonlights as a artist for, a lot of notably, The New Yorker, but the songs accounting by “hard scrabble singer-songwriter” (Time Out New York) and “erudite redneck” (Boston Globe) Andy Friedman aren’t accounting for laughs. "Friedman has a ability of bombastic self-loathing that abounding white bodies with guitars would annihilate for," says Nashville Scene. The appellation clue to his admission flat album, Taken Man (City Salvage Records/Rounder Europe), begin itself at #30 on the New York Post's "207 Best Songs To Download in 2007.” Other songwriters actualization on the all-encompassing account cover Amy Winehouse ("Rehab" #1), Neil Young ("Dirty Old Man" #65), Bruce Springsteen ("Radio Nowhere" #114), and 50 Cent ("I Get Money #205").

“An un-ironic country arena flourishes in Brooklyn,” wrote Mark Ferris in a contempo affair of The Village Voice, which adherent a feature-length awning adventure about Brooklyn Country. “Brooklyn acidity is as amoebic as fertilizer. No poseurs actuality . . . Most participants tend to be talented, intellectual, and eccentric.” Nicknamed the “Hillbilly Leonard Cohen” (Athens News) and “The King of Art Country,” (Minneapolis City Pages) Friedman is the apotheosis of aboriginal Brooklyn country songwriting, presenting “fractured folk songs” (Los Angeles Times) that analyze issues of art, agrarian dreams, and wanderlust, while adulatory “those who ablution down life’s address sandwiches with ice-cold despair” (Time Out New York).

On January 27, 2009, Friedman will absolution his additional flat album, Weary Things (City Salvage/Kindred Rhythm), and the aboriginal recorded with his casting The Other Failures, who represent “one of the a lot of admired bands on the Brooklyn scene.” (Cleveland Free Times)

In the album’s liner notes, David Gates — the Pulitzer-nominated columnist (Jernigan) and above chief arts biographer for Newsweek — sets the accent for Weary Things: “What [Friedman] sees through his windshield isn’t Greil Marcus’s Old Weird America, but the awe-inspiring new America area the pastoral is no best pure.” In “Locked Out of the Building,” a thumping, electric John Lee Hooker–inspired agreeable boogie, “a little country abundance 5 afar accomplished the light/is added big-ticket than Brooklyn.”

In “Freddy’s Backroom,” the third bearing Brooklynite (“My grandpa was bistro at Junior’s afore they served cheesecake,” offers Friedman) writes a atrocious ode to his admired adjacency dive bar, which will anon be demolished. The quiet adjacency area Friedman lives will be the approaching home for the Brooklyn Nets (currently the New Jersey Nets), complete with a Frank Gehry amphitheatre and four forty-plus adventure high-rise affluence towers. “The burghal pastoral is vanishing too,” observes Gates.

Throughout the almanac — produced by label-mate, continued time crony, and Charlottesville, Virginia-based songwriter and guitarist Paul Curreri (The Velvet Rut, Songs for Devon Sproule) — Friedman reveals an affluence of beauteous realities that accomplish him weary. The album’s aboriginal clue is the black “I Miss Being Broken, Lowdown, and Alone,” declared in the liner addendum as “a contemplative attending aback at accepting young, afflicted and lost.” Says Gates, “the ambiguity is so acutely counterbalanced that a animation would alpha it rocking.” On the beefing “Idaho,” Friedman longs to biking to some of his admired wide-open spaces: Idaho, New Mexico, and Colorado, to account a few. “I’m gonna get aback there/if I anytime get the time,” he sings. “Road Trippin’” is presented on this accumulating alert — already as the antic rockabilly adaptation that has become a admired at abide performances (“People ball on the tables,” declares Friedman), and addition as “Road Trippin’ Daddy,” offered as a black lullaby. Friedman, a adherent bedmate and ancestor of two, has alloyed animosity about the aggregate of time he spends on the road. “If you see me packing/There’s a acceptable time to adumbrate my keys,” the artisan sings. The allegory treatments blush the song’s identical lyrics with a affection of affront and assurance on the one hand, answerability and affliction on the other, respectively.

In the end, Friedman’s assuming of himself as a weary artist, poet, observer, traveler, and ancestors man is varnished with a coat of optimism. Perhaps the a lot of sparsely abiding agreement on the album, “Weary Apology” offers clues to the songwriter’s faculty of fulfillment, and a admiration to accumulate alive and dreaming, no amount the costs or how annoyed he gets. “I don’t charge to accomplish a weary apology,” he sings, “I spent a anniversary in a bank abode in Aquinnah endure June/took a access to a roof accouter and a ladder to the moon.”

The album’s barbaric closer, “The Friedman Holler,” was aback recorded at a abide achievement in Chicago, Illinois, and exhibits all of the affidavit why this “hot abide act” (NPR) has garnered such abounding common acclaim and a growing following. A affair song in the attitude of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Lewis Boogie” or Carl Perkins’ “Perkins Wiggle,” the tune lays out Friedman’s “Art Country” manifesto: “Art and country is for lovers/whatever blush your collar.”

While his songs are annihilation but funny, Friedman has appear over a dozen gag cartoons in The New Yorker beneath the pseudonym Larry Hat. As an illustrator (published beneath his own name), Friedman’s assets appear consistently in actually hundreds of magazines and newspapers worldwide, including a contempo awning for the New York Times Magazine. "If you're added accustomed with his [drawings] than his growl," says Pittsburgh City Paper, "you may ambition to get bigger acquainted."