Our Song of the Day comes from The Male Pattern, a project by Will Schwartz, a songwriter, novelist, and English professor from Queens, NY. “Charlie (The Robbery)” is a refreshingly original take from his forthcoming album, I Was Shot in the Heart!, out on September 25th via Barely Out Recordings. The press describes the album as a character-driven, narrative work that explores and exploits Americana tropes to capture its time and place; a concept album in the tradition of Darren Hayman’s ‘Pram Town’ (dubbed a “Folk Opera”), Terry Allen’s ‘Lubbock (On Everything),’ and Alex Cameron’s ‘Forced Witness.’
Funny, clever, sneakily beautiful…and tragically messed up, as we discover in his latest single, on which Schwartz is joined by Danny Bateman from Frog on piano. Schwartz’s quill is seriously well-honed and raw; with Bateman’s piano backing, it kind of reminded me of the sun-bleached desperation and isolation of Fante.
He shares:
“Our guy robs a small-time drug dealer. He only wants to scare him with his gun, but ends up screwing the job up while trying to remember a bad-ass line from the Dark Knight Rises and, in a moment of confusion, blasts the poor guy’s head off. My stab at a Bruce Springsteen ballad, but with little less tragic yearning and a little more blood spatter.”
After listening to his new single, it may come as no surprise that Schwartz’s creative outputs include fiction. His bio reveals that he began making music in the early 2010s as a co-songwriter/vocalist in Uncles with Daniel Bateman and Tom White of Frog before issuing one solo EP via Monkfish Records. He then shifted his focus to fiction writing, and his work has been published in Newtown Literary, Ninth Letter, The Baltimore Review, and The Briar Cliff Review, from which he received the 2017 award for literary fiction.
Today, being Bandcamp Friday, is a great day to pre-order the album.
Order it here: https://themalepattern.bandcamp.com/album/i-was-shot-in-the-heart