MY FAVORITE (ARTICLE)
Fugue, Fall/Winter 2004.
Fugue, Fall/Winter 2004.
My Favorite
Over pints of Guinness in an outer borough pub, Michael Grace Jr., the 31-year-old mastermind behind NYC new wave combo My Favorite, is waxing philosophical about his formative years.
"In it’s earliest days, I started this band as an escape plan for the two of us," he confides, referring to bandmate and ex-girlfriend Andrea Vaughn. "It was ridiculous to be playing the music we did in the mid 90’s and living on Long Island and expecting to be on MTV—akin to believing you could fly or walk through walls. So you made music for yourself and your friends you didn’t want to die. You created a world you could live inside that substituted for the real world."
That idea of a world within a world—a sort of United States of Teenage Misfits—is an important point of entry, especially in light of the collection of beautiful losers that populate My Favorite’s songs. Celibate young lovers spend summers indoors, listening to the same mixtape over and over again. Listless suburbanites sharpen their boredom into weapons. Dancing club kids are serenaded by ghosts. As the protagonist of "L=P" admits, "Loneliness is pornography to them, but to us it is an art."
The above scenes aren’t mere adolescent melodrama; they’re pages torn from personal histories. My Favorite—comprised of Grace and Vaughn (vocals and synthesizers), Darren Amadio (guitar), Gilbert Abad (bass), the mono-monikered Todbot (drums), and new member Kurt Brondo (synthesizers and accordion)—have been carving out a niche for themselves with hyper-literate, 80’s informed pop for more than a decade, after bonding over a shared appreciation of New Order, The Jam, and The Smiths, and a hatred of their desolate, strip mall-infested college town. Equal parts conceptual art project and band, they made no secret of their allegiances: stolen beauty, hopeless causes, the urgency of youth, and the entire received pantheon of melancholy outsiders. Remarkably, the purity of that vision has remained relatively unsullied by the intervening years; if anything, it’s now more finely articulated than ever.
Those intervening years, though, have been far from easy. Depression, indifference, and the reality of the "working person’s art rock experience," as Grace describes it, all left their scars, as did the longstanding perception that their devotion to new wave was some kind of gimmick. "We’re not a calculated band," Grace insists. "We sound the way we do because of early, unavoidable conditioning of some kind. There’s very little of new wave that’s important to me in terms of promoting ideas, but the sound of records and voices imprints on us. The way that writers will set books in certain time periods just for cohesiveness, I think we play music that way."
Now, in the wake of the renewed interest in all things 80’s spurred by bands like Interpol and The Stills, resistance is finally beginning to crumble. With a pair of exceptional albums on Double Agent—1999’s Love at Absolute Zero and 2003’s The Happiest Days of Our Lives, a compilation of three limited edition EPs loosely inspired by Joan of Arc—as well as a devoted cult following at home and in Sweden, attention is starting to mass around their soulful, hook-filled character studies. "We’ve spent the last four years reinventing ourselves as a healthy, grown-up pop band about unhealthy, un-grown-up people," Grace jokes. "Of course, we’ll always have that element of screwing things up from a career point of view, like blowing our big opportunity by forcing people to think about Joan of Arc."
Over pints of Guinness in an outer borough pub, Michael Grace Jr., the 31-year-old mastermind behind NYC new wave combo My Favorite, is waxing philosophical about his formative years.
"In it’s earliest days, I started this band as an escape plan for the two of us," he confides, referring to bandmate and ex-girlfriend Andrea Vaughn. "It was ridiculous to be playing the music we did in the mid 90’s and living on Long Island and expecting to be on MTV—akin to believing you could fly or walk through walls. So you made music for yourself and your friends you didn’t want to die. You created a world you could live inside that substituted for the real world."
That idea of a world within a world—a sort of United States of Teenage Misfits—is an important point of entry, especially in light of the collection of beautiful losers that populate My Favorite’s songs. Celibate young lovers spend summers indoors, listening to the same mixtape over and over again. Listless suburbanites sharpen their boredom into weapons. Dancing club kids are serenaded by ghosts. As the protagonist of "L=P" admits, "Loneliness is pornography to them, but to us it is an art."
The above scenes aren’t mere adolescent melodrama; they’re pages torn from personal histories. My Favorite—comprised of Grace and Vaughn (vocals and synthesizers), Darren Amadio (guitar), Gilbert Abad (bass), the mono-monikered Todbot (drums), and new member Kurt Brondo (synthesizers and accordion)—have been carving out a niche for themselves with hyper-literate, 80’s informed pop for more than a decade, after bonding over a shared appreciation of New Order, The Jam, and The Smiths, and a hatred of their desolate, strip mall-infested college town. Equal parts conceptual art project and band, they made no secret of their allegiances: stolen beauty, hopeless causes, the urgency of youth, and the entire received pantheon of melancholy outsiders. Remarkably, the purity of that vision has remained relatively unsullied by the intervening years; if anything, it’s now more finely articulated than ever.
Those intervening years, though, have been far from easy. Depression, indifference, and the reality of the "working person’s art rock experience," as Grace describes it, all left their scars, as did the longstanding perception that their devotion to new wave was some kind of gimmick. "We’re not a calculated band," Grace insists. "We sound the way we do because of early, unavoidable conditioning of some kind. There’s very little of new wave that’s important to me in terms of promoting ideas, but the sound of records and voices imprints on us. The way that writers will set books in certain time periods just for cohesiveness, I think we play music that way."
Now, in the wake of the renewed interest in all things 80’s spurred by bands like Interpol and The Stills, resistance is finally beginning to crumble. With a pair of exceptional albums on Double Agent—1999’s Love at Absolute Zero and 2003’s The Happiest Days of Our Lives, a compilation of three limited edition EPs loosely inspired by Joan of Arc—as well as a devoted cult following at home and in Sweden, attention is starting to mass around their soulful, hook-filled character studies. "We’ve spent the last four years reinventing ourselves as a healthy, grown-up pop band about unhealthy, un-grown-up people," Grace jokes. "Of course, we’ll always have that element of screwing things up from a career point of view, like blowing our big opportunity by forcing people to think about Joan of Arc."