MP3 Hot Heels Records - Ep
"Passionate vocals complemented by excellent guitar and Dylanesque harmonica work. This is a terrific debut by an artist with a poetic sensibility and real promise for the future." -New Classics [Genre: Beatfolk]
8 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Modern Folk, URBAN/R&B: Soul
Details:
Hot Heels Records (band name).
This is the solo debut ep of Chicago songwriter, Brandon Seyferth (pronounced ''Cypher-th''). In response to questions posed as to why he named, and later formed a band whose name could be confused as a record label, he quotes Albert Camus'' "The Plague; "I chose to be blindly obstinate, pending the day when I could see my way more clearly." His next release (with the newly formed Hot Heels Records), entitled "The Hi-Jacked Generation" is coming soon. Read the biography below.
To recieve tour updates, exclusive mp3''s, and to contact this artist, click "email Hot Heels Records" on the left of your browser window.
"Little Sister" featured on Tin Records'' New Music Series
"Hands" received honorable mention in Peacedriven Songwriting Awards
Hey, Little Sister
I''ve been watching tv a lot
Brown and blue shows into news;
Beginning to think that all the characters have been formed
In this world
On these grey streets
Hey, Little Sister
Why were you never born?
There''s pictures of you in my grandmother''s house
Warm as the breeze through the hayfield outside
Yellow like the light in her white hair
And these days I''ve been cold a lot
mm mm mm
And these days I''ve been cold a lot
And I''ve got nothin'' to say
You coulda'' helped me keep the wrong girls away from my heart
You coulda'' helped me keep the wrong girls away from my heart
You coulda'' helped me keep the death from my family
You coulda'' helped me keep my legs under me
You coulda'' helped me keep my father standing
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Steam (wrought iron kings)
I''m standing up, you''re screaming
At a trail of dust on a gravel road
The saint on your necklace is full-blown leaving
In a pack of smokes in a silent Ford
And the strobe lights at the back of the dawn
Have come through me like a broken bone
And the fourteenth floor above New York,
Its empty chairs watch the moon drift away
And the wrought iron fences stand like kings
As steam rises off the streets
The strobe lights at the back of the dawn
Have come through me like a broken bone
Oh and these days are leavin'' these days are leavin'' these days are leavin
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D Road (found poem)
"Found I had more in common with people who just plain cared about stuff."
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Home
Oh baby baby baby I need to
Hear you say you need to hear me
Oh baby baby baby Chicago
Ain''t that far away by train
There''s no such thing as goin'' home
No such thing as goin'' home
No such thing as goin'' home
Oh baby baby baby New England
Left a boarding pass on your shelves
Its corners smell like drowned-out fire
Its penmanship from someone slowed down
There''s no such thing as goin'' home
No such thing as goin'' home
No such thing as goin'' home
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Hands
They come out bold on the bridge but how''d this city get so dead
With its pocketwatch fences singin'' a funeral march to the grocery store bread?
And Little Suzan thinkin'' pride comes with change for a ten
Says it makes her love herself but in paragraphs she never mentions her friends
I raise my hands at the sign of the times I raise my hands
I raise my hands at the sign of the times
I drop my eyes
Faye logs on to the printing press, says she''s lookin'' at polls
But a change of heart seems so far away as the time goes...
I''m gonna'' go anyway.
I raise my hands at the sign of the times I raise my hands
I raise my hands at the sign of the times
I drop my eyes
----------
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For Tao Tao
Well I got everything
That I can handle
But I miss your laugh like I
Miss the bus
And I''ve got millions of days to
Pay your rent.
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EP CREDITS:
All songs by Brandon Seyferth except "These Days." "D Road" orchestrated as found poem by Brandon Seyferth. Ep produced by Jon Roberts, Brandon Seyferth and Brian Thomas.
Brandon Seyferth: vocals, guitar, harmonica, bass
Jon Roberts: percussion, bass, guitar
___________
BIOGRAPHY:
Chicago. Sweet home before Alabama grabbed that title with its smudgy, hard hands and its affinity for putting aircraft on poles. Brandon Seyferth (pronounced ‘cypher’), a newcomer here, is releasing his first EP in March of ‘06 under the pseudo-band-name Hot Heels Records.
After coming off a stretch of being assigned to the fame-seeking dilettantes who crawl over the music and art scenes of so many cities, I’m suspicious of him even as he walks in to meet me at the diner he had suggested on the corner of California and Milwaukee. That suspicion was my fault, my bitterness, and I knew it. But through all the pop stars and television smothering that presses down on us I miss artists. Real artists. People with something to say aside from ‘hey everybody, look at me!’ I believed in his music. I was waiting for him to fall short. A waitress interrupts our hellos with a flashed smile and a pot of coffee as Brandon sits down, keeping his leather jacket on, setting a collection of poems by Joseph Brodsky and John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” in the seat next to him. I wasn’t impressed that he brought books. A lot of people do that. I would learn over the next hour however that Brandon is not a lot of people, and that I would not be disappointed.
He looks out the window. “It’s starting to get cold.” I knew enough about him already to know he is twenty-six, an award-winning poet at twenty-two. Nothing about how he looked told me that he had wandered China without a penny or a plan for more than a year, or that he had lived in an oxygen tent for the first part of his life. Nothing told me he had worked and traveled the U.S. East coast with a carnival, but he had. I would find out later that night that seeing him perform makes his eclectic background stick out in a distinctly educated American way. Live, he’s part jazz hustle-bustle, part folk-poet, looks like James Dean or Jack Kerouac, will play a punk-influenced song next to a Motown one, make them both sound like songs drug out from Woody Guthrie''s Great Depression and clap an immediacy on them with lyrics that look at present times and hearts with a clear and honest eye. His songs are catchy, relevant, mature, and he never lets you know what’s coming next- on guitar he’ll get you watching his right hand and slap you with the left even if you choose to turn a closed ear. He is a professional and an artist who cares deeply about his audience. In conversation, he is perpetually and frustratingly the devil’s advocate.
“Yeah, there was snow on the ground yesterday,” I said. I spun my coffee cup in place and asked him about his childhood. He answered with a string of lies. I called him on it. He chuckled.
“I hadn’t been interested in folk music until I came to Chicago and saw some cats from the Old Town School playing standards at an open mic. I had been into soul, blues, motown, rockabilly, jazz before. Jazz taught me to improvise, soul taught me to make damned sure that improvisation didn’t make the night sterile. I picked up playing the harmonica on a rack about six months ago and started getting compared to Bob Dylan all the time. I liked that- took it as a compliment. I figured I’d take it as a cue to start lying my ass off- seemed to help him, start of his career... there''s a great line by Joseph Brodsky in one of his poems: "I proudly admit that my finest ideas are second-rate, may the future take them as trophies of my struggle against suffocation." I think my generation can relate to that- we live in a homeless land.”
Brandon pulls out a roll of quarters from his left jacket pocket to pay the bill, smirks at me. I chuckle, "let me get this one."
-James Venerky
___________
INFLUENCES:
The pigeonhole in no particular order: Schneider tm, Kyuss, The Funk Brothers, Otis Redding, Radiohead, Gospel Street Singers, Alabama Harp Singers, Al Green, Lhasa De Sela, The Baptist Generals, The Beatles, Portishead, Daniel Johnston, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Howlin'' Wolf, Failure, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, The Velvet Underground/Lou Reed, The Violent Femmes, Woodie Guthrie, Jon Roberts, Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, The Ramones, PJ Harvey, Stephen Foster, Pixies, Nico, Chopin, Langston Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Charles Reznikoff, Allen Ginsberg, Elvis Presley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Clutch, Hank Williams, Goldfrapp, Spoon, Television, Sparklehorse, Vertigo Kidd, Pat MacDonald, Eric Sommer, Darryl Danru, IC Adam Eating, John Steinbeck, Albert Camus, Ralph Emerson, Marc Maron, Michel Montaigne, Lord Clark, George Meredith, Francis Bacon, Tom Stoppard, Winston Churchill, Kings of Leon, New York Dolls, I don''t know; "But to my mind, though I am native here/ And to the manner born, it is a custom/ More honor''d in the breach than the/ observance." - Shakespeare, a bunch of others... changes from song to song.