Two Recent Appearances

My brother Kurt Weisman rereleased his 2006 album More is More. Its maximalist density is somehow intensified by its brevity—it was originally released as a 7” record—and by the fact that it’s not all maximalist. For example, the song I’m on is just Kurt on voice and guitar and me playing my mother’s upright piano. It was recorded live to MiniDisc in our parents’ house in Durham, New Hampshire, with one stereo microphone, and then sped up. It’s Kurt’s song, but I helped with the lyrics. Then we worked out my piano part and recorded it. Those in the know know More is More is a stone-cold classic (with art by the legendary Ben Jones) and will purchase it forthwith even if they already have it. (It has a bonus track.) I covered a song from More is More on Trash Picture in 2007. Kurt invented a new kind of album eighteen years ago and arguably the world has yet to catch up.

elie mcafee-hahn’s follow-up to May 2024’s No Sun On Main Street is, somehow, just as good, if not even better. It is really crazy. How complexity this rich can be held together this loosely I do not know. It’s like a precarious stack of wagons being towed over untamed terrain by a gossamer-thin string of thread. But the wagons don’t topple and the thread doesn’t break. elie wrote the song that I’m on, but we arranged and recorded and mixed it together in elie’s apartment. It was particularly fun recording the back-up vocals together. Go buy it and get in on the ground floor of this wonderful new style.