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Band Tells Story of its Namesake With 'The Life and Death of Longface'

By Ed Komenda | July 22, 2015 5:50am
 Longface, a Chicago-based rock band, is starting an East Coast tour in tandem with the release of their debut album:
Longface, a Chicago-based rock band, is starting an East Coast tour in tandem with the release of their debut album: "The Life and Times of Longface."
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Rachel Brown

CHICAGO — Meet Longface.

In one reality, he's a troubled, blue-collar and farm-raised dreamer from the south who tried to escape his small-town roots for a musicman's career in a big, bad city of the north.

In another reality Longface is a four-piece rock/post-punk band — mostly built with musicians from Chicago's working-class South Side — that's about to release a record called "The Life and Death of Longface," a concept album that tells the story of its namesake character.

On the band's Facebook page, in the "genre" slot, the band typed "Love/Sick."

Ask bass player Dillon Kelly how he'd describe Longface's sound, and his answer is equally ambiguous: "Post-dad rock."

Formed in January, Longface, now touring the East Coast, drew much inspiration from childhood days in the city's South Side neighborhoods.

Set for a late-summer release from Brooklyn-based record company Already Dead Tapes, the band's debut, "The Life and Death of Longface," is a five-song E.P. chronicling Longface's evolution from a farmboy to a city-scarred songster who falls in love with his muse, a woman named Agnes Pachoulia Earheart.

By the time you reach the album's second track, "Carpetbaggers," Longface has learned Pachoullia is expecting a child, forcing him to quit the band after years of gigging and return to his boyhood home in the south.

According to the band's own description of the album's arc, the song "expresses the emotional turmoil and existential mediocrity that begins to weigh all too heavily on Longface’s heart."

You can listen to the debut release of the song "Carpetbaggers" here:

The record's third track, "The Pit of Never Ending," describes Longface's subsequent drug abuse and psychological malaise that eventually leads to the character's breakdown.

The album turns semi-hopeful with "Pachoulia," when Longface dreams of the joy he felt meeting his muse.

By the album's last track, "Spring Bottom Belly," Longface faces his inner demons — a moment marked by his confrontation with the wooden bird inside of the cuckoo clock of his childhood home.

Why does "The Life and Times of Longface" matter?

You might find an answer in the origins of the players behind the music: Guitarist/vocalist Anthony Focareto (Andersonville), guitarist Glenn Curran (Lakeview), bassist Dillon Kelly (Roscoe Village) and Kain Marzalado (Avondale).

They learned to play their instruments and sing as kids in the working class hotspots in and around Chicago, particularly the Southwest Side, where most of the band members — except Marzalado, who hails from Avondale — grew up in neighborhoods like Midway, Mt. Greenwood and Cicero.

The ups and downs of Longface's journey can be boiled down to a metaphor for the frustrations experienced among the working class, said Glenn Curran, the band's lawyer-by-day, guitar-player-by-night.

He described the city's South Side as the "the urban backdrop of our own attempts to live meaningful and creative lives with music."

To describe Longface as rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t cut it. But the band's real engine comes from influences like songwriter Frank Zappa, who often used narratives and humor to build concept albums.

“He also often satirized American culture, which we are doing to an extent,” Curran said.

The album’s “pop” moments come from lead singer Focareto’s and bassist Kelly's deep love for The Band’s Levon Helm and the group’s “Basement Tapes” era.

It's not too surprising then that Helm’s story shares an important beat with the tale of Longface: Helm was from the south, and moved north to join The Band.

Before the band took off for their East Coast tour, Curran and the band got together and answered a list of questions from DNAinfo Chicago. Here's what Longface had to say about the songwriting process, storytelling and the City of Chicago:

1. Why did you name the album’s central character Longface?

CURRAN: Dillon came up with the band name before we wrote any of the songs. Anthony started experimenting with different vehicles for lyric writing and wrote a love song about a fictional character named “Pachoulia.” Since she was fictional, he felt comfortable making the lyrics intentionally immature and humorous. Lyrics like “Oh my god, holy cow, I’m in love with her” were really funny to us. Using characters was liberating because we could write songs about the same old topics from a fresh perspective. We eventually realized that, although the song was about Pachoulia, it was really about Pachoulia as seen through the eyes of the singer, who must also be fictional. We naturally assumed that protagonist to be named Longface. His story started to build from there.

2. What was the process behind building the Longface narrative? Did the writing happen as a group? How long did it take to break the story?

CURRAN: We didn’t really set out to write a “concept” record. It came about organically because the use of fictional characters made the lyric-writing process open to collaboration. Instead of a singer writing sad songs about himself, Anthony and I collaborated to write lyrics about some guy named Longface. The story came together during many hours of laughing (and beer) while demo-ing vocals on my laptop in the month leading up to recording. We took each song one at a time. We made explicit connections to other lyrics, and incubated ideas that we could develop in other songs. It was like putting together a hilarious puzzle, knowing that we might be the only ones who think it’s hilarious.  

3. Longface seems to carry a gritty, blue-collar badge on the pocket over his heart. What is Longface trying to say about the working class?

CURRAN: We all come from working-class backgrounds, and we have all pursued music as a creative outlet. Longface’s story is a tongue-in-cheek expression of our own lives in that regard. At the same time, it is an attempt to contextualize our individual experiences in what we see as an archetypal struggle of the working-class: namely, the struggle to balance economic necessity with meaningful self-actualization. That’s what Longface’s story is all about. His “Life & Death” is a metaphor for his attempt to deal with the economic burdens of family and society at the expense of his ability to self-actualize through art.

4. What’s next for Longface? Will he recover after his confrontation with the Cuckoo Clock?

CURRAN: That’s a good question. We intentionally left the ending open to interpretation. We’re not even sure whether Longface’s confrontation with the cuckoo clock is meant to represent defeat or liberation in his struggle to self actualize.

Here's a look at Longface's upcoming tour dates:

Wednesday: Cambridge, MA @ Out of the Blue Too Art Gallery

Thursday: Philadelphia, PA @ Robot Pirate Island

Friday: Pittsburgh, PA @ The Shop

Sunday: Kokomo, IN @ Main Street Skate Park

Monday: Chicago, IL @ Subterannean Downstairs (Record Release show w/ Daymaker and Teen Cult)

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