About the album
Brandon Patton's newest album, "Underhill Downs," features 21 guest performers, and more than 20 different instruments: acoustic, electric, and midi guitars, upright and electric bass, violin, viola, cello, drum machines and computer programs, rhodes, synthesizers, trumpet, saxophone, vibraphone, a variety of hand percussion, drumsets, farm implements, piano, zither, and melodica.
Album notes for Underhill Downs are here.
The "Underhill Downs" project started in earnest in 2004, and is named after Patton's former home studio, which was in the basement of an apartment on Underhill Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 2008, when the racehorse Eight Belles was euthanized immediately after her 2nd place finish in the Kentucky Derby (which takes place at Churchill Downs), Patton found himself contemplating the costs of his own drive to succeed.
"I felt like my stubborn devotion to my musical goals had already destroyed several relationships, had taken a toll on my self esteem, and left me wondering about other lives I might have lived, jobs I might have had, babies that I might have raised," says Patton. "And then, it just seemed to me that if there were already all these heavy costs to trying to make this album, I had better hurry up and finish it, otherwise it would all have been for naught. But I needed help, I was driving myself crazy trying to do it all by myself. That's when I started reaching out to friends to help me complete it, and the whole project, for me anyway, really became a story about how I realized not just what I had lost, but what I had gained in this life I had chosen. I know all these incredible, talented, weird people, who share the same love of art, often to the detriment of their own standard of living."
Since finishing the album, Patton has been writing a memoir about the meaning and making of each song. Tales of the recording process and the people involved include digressions into gossip about the many musicians who participated.
Patton's album story begins with his doomed decision to follow a girlfriend to New York City and pass on a chance to play for John Vanderslice in San Francisco. It chronicles his heartbroken descent to rock bottom, when he sits naked and drunk in a bathtub trying to serenade partygoers using the toilet, and ends with an appearance in a musical theater production about zombies, which leads to touring the country with MC Frontalot and co-starring in a documentary film.
Patton will be posting his stories once a month on his webpage, along with a free download of each accompanying song.
About the artist
Brandon Patton, songwriter and instrumentalist, currently resides in Staten Island, N.Y.
Patton also plays bass under the pseudonym BL4k Lotus for MC Frontalot, progenitor of "nerdcore hiphop." MC Frontalot's band and its first national tour was the subject of the documentary Nerdcore Rising. The Wikipedia entry on MC Frontalot can be found here.
Patton also performs with playwright Prince Gomolvilas in the underground theater duo Jukebox Stories, called one of the 10 best plays of 2008 by the East Bay Express.
Patton composed the songs for Love Sucks: the Musical, a Shakespearean take on the punk rock of the 1970s, which won honorable mention at the 2007 New York Musical Theatre Festival.
Patton's previous album, "Should Confusion," was nominated for Album of the Year by the 2004 Independent Music Awards.
About his past
He was born in Grand Forks, N.D. His father was in grad school and his mother taught at a one-room schoolhouse. He grew up in St. Paul, Minn., but also lived in Trinidad and Tobago for two years while his father worked at the University of the West Indies.
Patton has been writing music since he was pre-pubescent. When he was 11 years old, the composer/ethnomusicologist Miriam Gerberg rented a spare room in his mother's house in St. Paul, MN, and Patton enlisted her help to write his first song, entitled "I'm Not Your Slave," a protest about house chores. In junior high, when he started listening to punk rock, he and his friends set out to be offensive and brash, penning the songs "Fuck the Nun," and "Fetus Burger." With slim pickings in the record collections of his parents (Neil Diamond, Judy Collins) Patton found inspiration in a vibrant DIY counter-culture of zine writers and indie bands who would brandish the word “sellout” and discuss politics in independent coffeehouses and alternative art galleries. Minneapolis was exporting some incredible music at the time, not just the ultra famous Prince, but acts such as the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, the Jayhawks, and Walt Mink.
He attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where the music department was ruled by experimental composers and ethnomusicologists. "It was incredible what I was exposed to there," says Patton, "but there was also this Midwestern voice in my head whispering 'College is not the real world.' I didn't want to become a disciple. And I couldn't play any of this amazing world music I loved and still have any authenticity." So in his own writing, he ended up turning toward the rock and pop of his youth. “I got obsessed with trying to figure out who I was in the midst of all of these new influences,” says Patton. “I was searching for an authentic expression of myself.”
After college, his first experience playing music professionally rammed this point home. He spent a summer playing Caribbean music (which he loves) for drunken tourists (not so much) next to a beach volleyball court inside a giant country western bar on Cape Cod (hated it).
His first solo album, "Nocturnal," was recorded after hours (because there was no soundproofing) in the basement of an office building in Easthampton, Mass. Patton frequently let a homeless friend sleep in the studio, and one night said friend locked himself out of the room wearing nothing but underwear and had to hide under the staircase for an entire work day until Patton happened by.
Patton used to play in the band three against four with Jay Skowronek (Maxeen) and fellow schoolmate Anand Nayak (Rani Arbo and Daisy Mayhem). Nayak and Patton were wandering down a dirt road one day and stumbled upon a decrepit slaughterhouse that turned out to be a recording studio. Inside was audio engineer Mark Alan Miller, who had worked with nearly every rock group in Western Massachusetts, including area royalty J.Mascis. Miller would later mix many of the tracks for their albums, as well as many of the tracks on Patton's later solo work.
Patton signed a deal with music publisher ACMRecords which has lead to music getting placed onto the soundtracks of several TV shows, including Monster Garage, That 70s Show, and The Real World.
Patton was one of five songwriters to win an internet contest earning an invitation to perform at the Newport Folk Festival in 2004.
The Temecula Film and Music Festival named Brandon Patton Top Music Artist in 2005, but failed to make good on a promise of a free hot air balloon ride.
