As of October 2023 we had released three EPs and an LP; produced dozens of music videos; have had songs placed in HBO's The Affair, Ira Sach's Passages (Sundance Selection, Best Film at Berlin Film Festival), DarkNet, and numerous TV shows and movies; and performed at SXSW, CMJ, Northside Festival and as headliners at many of New York's prominent venues.
After a decade of running CitizenMusic / CitizenMusic Presents, all the while playing and writing music for fun, my relationship with several of my bands gradually and naturally began to change into that which included my artistic input. Between 2011-2014 I joined in on rehearsals and recording sessions with New Madrid, WALNUTS and The Shake. During one such session with The Shake I presented the band with a song I had written several years earlier called "All That I Want." The band was quickly taken with it and recorded a superb version of it, adding in a bridge part of their own, which introduced a musical momentum that spawned a marvelous guitar solo and outro section. It was also a bringer-down of the house as a live performance.
Written in an apartment in Clinton Hill, recorded at The Bunker in Bushwick, with overdubs (the "Harrison chord" on "Winter Love,"), our debut recordings were brisk, lively, exciting. These few songs, accompanied by just a few others which were never (yet) recorded and a spontaneously-generated series of inside jokes established us as a danceable and interactive live band in Williamsburg and on Manhattan's Lower East Side. I could say humble beginnings, but truth-be-told, we were quite polished from the jump.
We recorded in a barn in the Hudson Valley, NY over the course of a weekend. Overdubs would happen in a living room on the Upper West Side on Manhattan. And the songs would propel us to a headlining band on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn. From Saturday night sell-outs at Mercury Lounge to residencies at Arlene's Grocery and two-venue holiday throw-downs at Pianos and Cake Shop, The Motor Tom were on a roll after the release of Super Sexy Space Station.
"1.21 gigawatts / Maybe in the future all the bullshit stops / But I won't hold my breath." "Burn It to the Ground" quickly became our go-to set closer, as it is - and I'm being as objective a co-writer as I can be - an absolutely blazing punk rock number.
"Weight Off" balances the aggression of the opening track with its airy lushness. "The feeling that I'm under / It's like thunder / From a hundred million miles away" marries the song's graceful tempo and gentle symphonic instrumentals with lyrics which are more surreal than most Motor Tom lyrics.
"Aye Yai Yai" is our take on the Days of the Week musical trope, while "Illusions of Love" is a pastiche to an early-90s style of love-rock song that borrows its lyrical themes from High Fidelity (that is, I was watching High Fidelity and wrote a song about it).
The album opens with a track that includes my personal favorite Motor Tom moment, which is the group-chanted bridge. Embedded in the lyrics is an easter egg for vintage Woody Allen fans.
"Weight of the Sun" has a rhyme I've always enjoyed, which pairs "Cradle, baby, steady job" with "Groceries in the borrowed Saab."
"Timing" is among the breeziest of any Motor Tom song with shrug-of-the-shoulder lyrics sat atop a playful Soca beat.
"New York Minute" is our response to Taylor Swift's song about New York.
My songwriting partner, who is also one of my closest friends, Andrew Henry Harding is a vastly capable musician. Musically he is precise where I am reckless, he is certain where I am anxious, and he is expert where I am wandering. While my reverence for his abilities may cause me to over-diminish my own, it is a reverence that nonetheless served as the catalyst to me setting off on my own for this set of recordings.
This first LP under the pseudonym of Cheerry Red was not designed to propel me to stardom, but instead to provide me the space to let my ideas bounce, careen, tumble and ignite. That said, the opening track is kind of a total banger, and there are moments in each song of which I am sincerely proud.
