The opening band playing at Mercury Lounge that night was Brooklyn band "The Piggies", which came on stage after One Chord Progression DJ's started the night.
I liked The Piggies right off. They were my favorite that night. The melodic lines drew me in right away. The rough around the edges style, but, at the same time, the way their sound was mixed had such an amazing clarity.
There were also vibrant lyrics, sparked with humor in the right places. And the good melodic lines, a little bit blues-infused.
The band is a four piece. Last week I had a conversation with Andy, who does vocals and guitar. He fills us in on their background and their creative process. ::: It's kind of hard to separate the band from our personal friendships and relations, but to make a long story short, I'm married to Kris (the drummer.) Brad (the other guitar player) and Matt (the bass player) are two of my oldest and best friends. We all happen to live within a square block of each other.
About five years ago, Kris and I were in a band called the Underthings and wanted to start something new. We were jamming at our practice space, getting some tunes together, but not having much luck finding other people to play with. We really were looking for a bassist. I wasn't thinking about having a two guitar band, I was kind of going for a power trio. Even so, after a while we asked Brad to come down and play guitar. Brad had never been in a real band before, but I knew he was a good guitar player from hanging out with him. We played for a bit without a bassist, and finally, after a couple of weeks we asked Matt, who was also in the Underthings to come down and it all started to feel good. We just naturally played well together, as easy as if we were just having a conversation, or joking around.
Generally speaking, I write the songs. What I mean by that is, I write the words, and the chords, and whatever melody there is. Then we work it out as band, with everyone adding their part, suggesting possibilities , having opinions, and coming up with arrangement ideas. It's all done as a group. We hammer away at a tune and it all falls into place (for the most part) rather easily. I'm very lucky to have people who freely give as much as Brad, Kris and Matt. We're all big music people, so if anyone of us brings up a reference point as an idea for a song, we all know (to pick a few names out of a hat) who Elmore James is, or the MC5, or Hank Snow, or Clifton Chenier, etc. It makes for a very natural, and comfortable environment. Our tastes (somewhat miraculously) run along the same lines, though there isn't any kind of the snobbery or elitism that I have seen with a lot of musicians. I can talk to these guys without worrying about being judged. They know their sh*t.
We're working on getting a record out, it's going to be a full length album with ten songs. We're just about to start mixing. I'm very excited about it, because even at this stage, it sounds fantastic. We'll probably press 500 copies.We have to do everything on a pretty small scale.
We actually have something out on Norton Records, it's part of their series of Rolling Stones cover 45s. We do the song Parachute Woman. The other side of the record is La La Brooks doing Play With Fire.
I enjoyed The Piggies' music at Mercury Lounge. One of the songs with a more unique style was "Sweet As They Come", which features the vocals and guitars speaking back and forth, with the guitar first playing four descending notes, then followed by a vocal phrase, then repeating this sequence back and forth. This song is playing below right here on my blog page. While you can certainly hear the contrasts in this recorded version, they were much more pronounced when done on stage. ... But here is the recorded version of "Sweet As They Come" :::
Some bands sound better on stage; some sound better recorded. As good as The Piggies may sound here, they're even much better on stage, and I would urge you to follow them and watch for their next live show. They're not on Facebook, but you can find them on Facebook. Here is the click ::: The Piggies (CLICK HERE)
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