Video: Brian LaRue Performing on Live at Main Drag

Posted on August 4, 2021 by Brian LaRue
Video from summer 2020, posted in July 2021

Right around the Fourth of July, 2020, I appeared on an episode of Live at Main Drag, the webseries filmed at Main Drag Music in Williamsburg, playing three songs by Shelter Dogs solo, on a guitar that is not mine. Musicians around North Brooklyn and adjacent areas of Queens know Main Drag as the music shop that’ll provide what you need without necessitating a trip into Manhattan — they’ve been around forever. The shop has employed several friends and acquaintances of mine over the years, including Jamie Frey, host of Live at Main Drag and frontman of NO ICE, my personal favorite NYC band that isn’t famous yet. This episode was a blast: Olivia Russin and Stuart Solomon of The Regrets were on, playing some of their songs. Olivia is one of my favorite lyricists and singers on the scene in this city, as well. Jamie and keyboardist Sean Spada (also of NO ICE, also a deeply enjoyable solo artist, also at one point or another of too many other bands to list) serve as the series’ house band.

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Product Review: Żywiec Session IPA

Posted on July 7, 2021 by Brian LaRue
BYO tomato plants. And if you think I’m trying to turn “influencer,” you’re def on the wrong path.

I lived for about six and a half years on the outskirts of Greenpoint, Brooklyn (New York City’s Little Poland), and for the last two and a half years I’ve lived in Ridgewood, Queens (NYC’s other Little Poland). In that time, I’ve become devoted to Polish beers, which you can find in almost any bodega or deli around these parts, regardless of the ethnic background of the store’s owners. Most frequently, you’ll see the brands Żywiec, Tyskie, Lech, Okocim, Tatra, Żubr, Hevelius, Warka, Łomża, and Boss. According to the counter guy at the Polish deli near my place, they all come from the same distributor: “All from the same guy,” he said grimly, “and he can do what he wants, because he controls everything. Everything.”

I’m not complaining — they’re all fine by me, and they’re all cheap. Can’t go wrong with a 500mL bottle (1 pt., 0.9 fl. oz.) that goes for around $2 a pop. You’ve got your pale lagers, around 5-6% ABV, and also your assorted porters with around 9% ABV, and sometimes the stronger beers cost less than the weaker beers. It’s a good neighborhood perk, I think.

I was introduced to Polish beers years before I lived around here. On a trip through Poland and the Czech Republic, when I was 23, I realized something about so many of these Central European lagers: “Oh. This is what those American macrobrews are trying to be, except this actually tastes like lager, and it has a head, kind of.” There really is a more robust flavor and body in these lagers than in their milder American cousins — you can taste the malt or the wheat more clearly, and pair well with food (all varieties). 

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In Appreciation of the Fourth of July, the Greatest of the Cookout Holidays

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Brian LaRue
Friendly reminder YOU DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE TO DO THIS IS YOU DON’T WANT TO.

There are a lot of positive, cool things about the Covid vaccine becoming widely available here in NYC, and one of them is the timing. If you’re a reasonably social person, losing a social summer is a gigantic bum-out. Two in a row would have been brutal. I and a lot of my friends were able to get 100% vaxxed during the spring, and thank god for that. 

Now we can have a full-on Fourth of July again, and I personally am extremely here for it.

The Fourth of July is my favorite holiday, mostly because it’s the best holiday. I very often like to root for the underdog, and to some people — also maybe in a commercial sense — the Fourth might be something of an underdog. However, those people are wrong, and I’d rather not allow commerce into this discussion — it’s done enough damage to holidays (all varieties). The Fourth is objectively and measurably the best holiday. If you disagree with me, gaze into your heart and ask yourself whether your disagreement is rooted in some kind of sentimental attachment to anything else.

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On the Three-Part Creative Cycle: A Suggestion

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Brian LaRue
Collage by Mabel. Screenshot from Chaos: The Magazine for Non Believers, Vol. 2

During the first few months of the Covid pandemic in 2020, there was a lot of chatter about how we all can “use this time.” The presumption was that “sheltering in place,” staying at or close to home, our social lives on indefinite pause, our professional lives disrupted, surrounded by temporarily shuttered shops and restaurants, possibly out of work entirely, would give us time to focus on personal priorities. Things we’d neglected for too long, whether they be passion projects or mental health or whatever. Sounds cool on paper, but so many of us started freaking out anew and doubting our capabilities, because we just… never seemed to find the time we were supposed to use. Who doesn’t have a “pandemic project” they dropped entirely? 

The reality is that when your life is upended, and you’re anxious as balls all of the time, you’re not in a good place for mental focus. Most of us didn’t have the disposable income to feel comfortable and secure just sitting around and creating things indefinitely. Daily living through a pandemic is very time-consuming.

So when my friend Oliver Ignatius (the producer/engineer behind the board for the upcoming EP by my band, Safe Houses) asked me to write something timely Chaos: The Magazine for Non Believers — the journal he and his wife and collaborator Bernadette Higgins launched in 2020 — I pitched the essay I’m reposting below. In a nutshell, I argued the circumstances of the pandemic presented an opportunity to freedive into the psyche — and that it was more helpful to think of the moment as part of a longer creative process, rather than a space in which we should push ourselves to bring a project fully into fruition. It tied back to my old personal model for the creative process, a cycle of three distinct phases: media input, lived experience, and creative output. That framework is really the evergreen point and purpose of an essay like this. It’s kind of one of my secret recipes for keeping away from creative burnout and never running out of ideas to develop when the chance arises. Read it below the jump.

Also, do check out Chaos. It’s branded as a music journal, but it covers arts and culture far beyond music. Article topics include ketamine therapy, street-level BLM activism, the state of Hong Kong society — a lot of ground covered. And the artwork is diverse and inspired.

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I Was a Teenaged Ska Kid: A Mostly Unapologetic Confession

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Brian LaRue
Tools of the trade.

In 2017, my former colleague Brian Slattery (author, Spaceman Blues, Lost Everything, and more) invited me to contribute a “long personal essay” to the journal the New Haven Review, where he’s a long-time editor. Because it is essentially unthinkable for an obscure writer to be asked explicitly to turn out something both long and personal and to get paid for it, I immediately said yes. I threw Brian some possible topics, and he chose a journey through my brief but intense ska phase around the turn of the millennium. At that time, I had been a teenager, ripe for the Connecticut ska scene while it was at or near its peak regional popularity. Like a lot of teen stories, this one had a rapid-fire narrative arc, where I fell into the ska scene, the life cycle of an entire band of mine played out, and the scene seemed to cave in on itself, all within the span of two and a half years or so. Fifteen years later, those memories remained exceptionally vivid, almost tangible. It was a blast getting it all out on the page, even the head-smackingly embarrassing parts, even the parts where I was obliged to back up and contextualize things for the subset of the audience that had missed that cultural moment entirely. The New Haven Review is primarily a print journal (although back issues are available as downloadable .pdfs — you can find the Winter 2017 edition, where this essay first appeared, way down on this page at Issue 016), and this is the first time it’s been reposted in full on an actual website. It appears in its entirety, in very lightly edited form vs. the original 2017 version, right after the jump. (cw: mansplaining, alt-splaining, detailed descriptions of incredibly simple things, discussion of psychosexual dynamics of local/regional music scenes. All generalizations about various countercultural strains are my own and should not be interpreted as statements of historical fact.)

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ICYMI: The Band I’m In Is Called Shelter Dogs

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Brian LaRue
Photo by Jeanette Moses

I’m the primary singer, guitarist and songwriter in the garage rock/powerpop band Shelter Dogs, and that isn’t new. But in the time since this blog went on hiatus, Shelter Dogs came out of its own hiatus, and we’ve been up to quite a bit since then. Let’s catch up a bit.

I’ve been in Shelter Dogs since before this band was even called Shelter Dogs. One of the main reasons I moved to Brooklyn back in 2010 was to shop around an album an earlier lineup of this band had recorded. (Incidentally, that album to date has never been released, but I have some ideas on how to rectify that. Anyway.) We haven’t always been particularly active. That changed in 2018, when I rebooted Shelter Dogs with an entirely new (except for me) lineup, and we started hitting clubs and DIY spots on the reg. We released an EP called Crashing a Party With Shelter Dogs in the spring of 2019, on the excellent and prolific garage/punk/psych cassette label King Pizza Records. You should hear it.

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It’s Brian LaRue, the Blog: The Relaunch

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Brian LaRue

All right, so I took a six-year break from this blog, but now I’m back. 

Man, a lot can happen in six years. In mid-2015, I was living in a converted warehouse, throwing rock shows. I hadn’t met my partner yet. My previous full-time day job, which has since run its entire course, from its unexpected beginning to its logical end, wasn’t even on the horizon. There’s been a whole global pandemic. We’re in a markedly different social, cultural and political place than we were six years ago. The macro stuff you know perfectly well. Whatever I’ve been up to on the micro level has been folded into my bio, if you’re at all curious.

I’ve had plans for over a year to relaunch this site, but let’s be realistic: The subject matter that interests me hasn’t lined up well with the experiences we’ve been living through.

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That Summer When Jeff Lynne Really Understood My Pain

Posted on June 10, 2014 by Brian LaRue

ELO_A_New_World_RecordHere’s something I haven’t done in a while: A long-form music feature published somewhere other than this blog. My buds Jon Mann and Derek Hawkins — two men of many talents, whom New Yorkers of a certain persuasion might recognize as the dual frontmen of the Brooklyn punk/powerpop band Sunset Guns [RIP]– edit[ed] and contribute[d] to a really fun blog called Square Zeros [RIP — 2021 edits], which has a couple different functions. One is the online home of the Square Zeros podcast, in which Jon and Derek talk to active musicians about their very first bands, revisiting recordings their guests had made as teenagers. The other is the “In Defense Of…” series, in which musicians, writers and aficionados write about records or musical acts they love, but that are somehow underappreciated. That doesn’t mean those acts are unpopular. In fact, in most cases in this series, the act at the center of the story is extremely popular, or at least was for a brief moment. But in most cases, the writer thinks the act isn’t taken seriously enough by people of “discerning taste,” and sets about explaining what they hear in this record that makes it special to them. The best “In Defense Of…” posts get into some really interesting questions about art and fanship and subjective experience: Do I like this record because it’s good, or because I first heard it at a pivotal time in my life? What do my perceived tastes say about my hang-ups and prejudices? What do the things I like say about the person I think I am?

Turns out I’ve been writing an “In Defense Of…” column in my head about one of my 25 or so favorite albums for the past, I don’t know, seven years. Continue reading →

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Three Alt-Weeklies, My Own Salad Days and One Long Goodbye to Them All

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Brian LaRue

So much fun, we turned it into a lunchbox: Jeff Glagowski's 2004 illustration of a giant mayor's fictitious rampage.

So much fun, we turned it into a lunchbox: Jeff Glagowski’s 2004 illustration of a giant mayor’s fictitious rampage.

This morning, the final editions of the three alt-weekly newspapers that serve Connecticut — the New Haven Advocate, Hartford Advocate and Fairfield County Weekly — all hit newsstands. The Hartford Advocate, which I discovered on the floor of my high school’s chorus room, was the first alt-weekly I ever read and inspired me to pursue journalism seriously. The New Haven Advocate, which I read religiously through college, opened my eyes to the premise that whatever I wanted to get out of doing journalism, I wasn’t getting it from being a journalism major. (I switched to English pretty quickly.) At some point in my 20s, I wrote for each of those three papers. It’s often sad to acknowledge a significant part of your past is gone (and almost always a bum-out to realize you’ve reached an age when you can look back and notice how entities that at one point defined your life are totally gone), but my own sense of loss is a mere detail. The tragedy is that every region deserves an alt-weekly, and to imagine every Connecticut college campus and artists’ colony and band rehearsal complex to not have one that serves its own denizens… well, the image just doesn’t feel like Connecticut to me. The Connecticut I know is home to a culture where mild crankiness and dry wit ride high, where homegrown music and art are championed by very vocal local boosters, where the landscape is dotted with a few of the more prestigious colleges and universities in the U.S., where the political conversation tends to pan leftward, and where an extremely diverse (economically and ethnically) group of people try to understand each other and get along. Connecticut is alt-weekly country, man.

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I FIGURED OUT THE FORMULA FOR SUCCESS

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Brian LaRue

FormulaforsuccessI GOT it. FINALLY. It’s so SIMPLE.

All of my problems are solved.

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