Pino Marelli

The following is an excerpt of a 7 December 2013 email sent from Art to Will.

I like the backing band ideas, definitely.

I'm honored that you think these songs are deserving of that treatment (the ones we've co-written too, of course).

Pino Marelli in Sarasota

We are on the same page with the late-80s Leonard Cohen, but I was thinking even further in that direction:

I want to pre-record strange synthesized backing tracks to play with live.

I have been a big fan of this for a long time, although, admittedly, in an ironic Gen-X kind of way.

I get the hugest kick when, for example, in Italy, I'm wandering the streets hearing some cheesy band playing and I round the corner and it's just one guy playing guitar with a backing track!

Italians, in particular, have seen this as a monumental breakthrough in the history of music; it really has become the industry standard at most Italian gatherings.  The most recent one I saw was Pino Marelli at the Italian American Club of Lansing dinner.

The advantages of this approach are myriad:

• It is culturally accurate to our identities: immigrant populations are unencumbered by culturally elitist concepts like authentic/fake, cool/cheesy, analog/digital, etc.
• It takes steps toward and facilitates later, more full-fledged projects in that potential collaborators can start learning songs and MIDI recordings can be turned into sheet music
• Its tracks can be muted/un-muted depending on the personnel we happen to have on hand 
• It can be added to and improved through time
• It is considered hopelessly tacky, way more so than Leonard Cohen
• It allows you and I can work on these songs at our leisure
• I did this once before back in my Ann Arbor days and the hipsters really liked it

Spotify link: http://sptfy.com/5Qf