Bishop Allen :: Performance and Interview from the WNEW Studio

DOWNLOAD NOW: THE ANCIENT COMMON SENSE OF THINGS

DOWNLOAD NOW: SHANGAIED

In 2006, Brooklyn band Bishop Allen did something amazing – put out an EP of at least 3 songs every month (48 total) for an entire year. Rumor has it the project began when frontmen Justin Rice and Christian Rudder stumbled upon a discarded piano and dragged it into their rehearsal studio. That’s a pretty amazing feat for any artist to do, and a few of those monthly EPs got passed to me through a friend and I was amazed at what I heard. Their sound gets compared to The Kinks quite a bit, and rightly so – they have the same honest sound with extremely catchy songs, but there is a style to it all their own. Their music has been in rotation on all my mp3 devices since the first EP crossed my desk. Bishop Allen churns out some amazing music that very often gets compared to The Kinks. There are always a few songs on every album that have a sing-along quality, and today they have released their new album Grrr... which is more of what we love from them with a larger number of these songs having that element to them. We’re lucky that they’re a local band so we asked them to stop by, give us the scoop on the album, and play a few songs for us. Their last album The Broken String included a lot of the monthly EP songs on them, but reworked in some different ways. Because they had written so many songs for the EPs, I was curious if they simply went back into the EPs to hunt for more gems or worked on all new stuff.

Listen Up:

The title of the album Grrr… is definitely an interesting one, but not the first title they had in mind for the album as they explain.

Listen Up:

One of the songs that you find available for free download just about everywhere right now from them is The Ancient Common Sense of Things. It seems to be one of their favorites to play live, and here’s why.

Listen Up:

Now here’s your chance to sing-along with them – recorded live in our WNEW.com studio, this is The Ancient Common Sense of Things.

Ancient Common Sense of Things

There a song called Oklahoma on the album that I am particularly fond of and there’s a line in it that confused and delighted me at the same time. It was “I’m a man I insist, you insist I’m a piece of cake”. Bishop Allen’s lyrics are always playful, but this one especially stood out – after all how does one insist that a man is a piece of cake?

Listen Up:

The second song the band wanted to play for us was Shanghaied. As they mentioned earlier, some of the songs were born out of nonsense. This is a perfect example of nonsense taking shape into another fun sing-along song. Here’s the band doing another song from the new Grrr… album, get ready to be Shanghaied.

Shanghaied

The band’s got lots of tour dates to promote Grrr… so I highly recommend that you check out their website http://www.bishopallen.com/ to see when they’ll be in your area and you can also get some free mp3s on their site as well.