Thomas Comerford’s new single ‘Partners’ off ‘Introverts’ | “Soundtrack of Outsider Experience”
Exclusive premiere of ‘Partners’, taken from the new album by singer/songwriter Thomas Comerford.
Thomas Comerford is a resonant yet reticent singer/songwriter, writing songs for many years yet often too shy to perform them before other people. But the Chicago musician’s new album ‘Introverts’ sounds nothing like “bedroom pop”, more as if a veteran bard-troubadour settled in with a tight band at Ardent Studios in the days of gems like ‘No Other’ or ‘Here Come the Warm Jets’, crafting a crackling soundtrack of outsider experience.
Co-produced with fellow Chicagoan Robbie Hamilton at the latter’s studios, Skye Sound and Strange Magic, and chock full of reflective, sublime and not too spare confession-libations. It all sounds top shelf, containing a kick creating balance between intimate struggles and global suffering, filial devotion and personal freedom.
Comerford moved to the Windy City in 1999 and started Kaspar Hauser over an indie rock flurry of lineups and LP releases. By the start of this past decade, he was playing eponymously with backing musicians and put out ‘Archive + Spiral’ in 2011, ‘ll’ in 2014 and ‘Blood Moon’ in 2018. Comerford is also a part-time teacher of film, video and audio production at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
Comerford says, “When I started releasing solo records, a friend once commented how the songs and singing seem to merge Willie Nelson with Lou Reed. And that approximates where I’m coming from — folk rock with some glimmer and sparkle. I’ve described the music on the new LP as Eno meets folk.”
Robustly sung, with Comerford playing acoustic and electric guitars, 12-string acoustic guitars, synthesizers, Tremoloa, percussion, ‘Introverts’ is Comerford’s fourth full-length, and all the self-written songs add up to an effortlessly engaging, somewhat melancholy but empowering soul-folk universe of emotional complexity; demonstrating a universal understanding of restless pursuits of purpose and an innate sense of displacement.
The music handsomely reflects insouciant insights like “Just another cypher with bad knees / who can’t live the truth” and “Talk of a talking cure / but Freud is a bore” (‘The Method’), swarming with a cast of regionally awesome musicians, featuring players like drummer Kriss Bataille (ex-Urge Overkill), Matthew Cummings (Big Buildings), Azita Youssefi (AZITA), among others, and complimentary backing vocalists Ariel Bolles (Glass Mountain), Matt Focht (Bright Eyes), and Beth Yates (Smog).
“I didn’t set out to write a record”, Comerford explains. “In 2015, I had a lot of songs stored up that I started recording at every opportunity. One group of songs was approached by practicing and arranging with players and then recording, so that group finished more quickly and became the ‘Blood Moon’ LP (2018). Unlike those songs, the songs on ‘Introverts’ started to congeal together because when I started recording them, there was no road map for what they might become. Things seemed to take off and grow when Robbie and I started bringing more synthetic sounds into play, upending my usual M.O. of adding as many guitars as possible, though we still managed to get a lot of guitars in there.”
Three songs very likely to attract attention are the sweetly chugging ‘Three Sisters’; ‘Partners’ – “a duet I wrote secretly hoping AZITA would agree to sing with me. She heard the demo and agreed!” “It’s about two misfits, but also the crowd around the misfits, who form their own little world and the kinds of thinking that might be part of their scene. Think Bonnie and Clyde but also your local hardcore punk scene … somewhere in that spectrum are these two partners”; and ‘Not Like Anybody Else’, which “was written from the perspective of an introvert displaying a lot of false bravado, but who really is just a straight-man for a circus performer.”
On a personal level, at the heart of the album, “Right now the two songs that are most difficult to listen to, because of my Mom’s passing in 2019, yet also compelling to me are ‘Cowboy Mouth’ and ‘Three Sisters’, he says.
“Some of the lyrical passages in those songs have bits and pieces of my Mom’s and my biographies woven in. She did write me letters to ‘talk of religion’ as in ‘Cowboy Mouth.’ And my own Mom was one of three sisters, and she had a difficult time growing up because of her mother’s alcoholism as in ‘Three Sisters’; and her own kids (myself included) scattered across the country even though she did a great job. And she also found a real, profound love with my father, and the song attests to that as well.”
For fun on the side recently, Comerford started Another VU, a Velvet Underground tribute group, who play songs from the band’s 1969 era, saying, “A lot of people tell me I sound like Lou Reed, so I felt like I had to do this, in-part, to test that out.”
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