One of the coolest acts to come out of Brooklyn’s music scene is a country-crooning Jewish cartoonist from the New Yorker magazine who has two creaky chords and a voice that sounds like it was run over by the kind of beat-up Dodge that rumbles through his songs.
Then again, he may just be the truest singer-songwriter in the borough.
Friedman lives in Prospect Heights, near Freddy’s Bar, the Prohibition-era tavern that is slated to be torn down for Bruce Ratner’s basketball arena. The bar appears in a mournful song on Friedman’s forthcoming CD, “Weary Things,” which will be unveiled at Friedman’s Jan. 29 show at Southpaw. This week, he traded bons-mots with GO Brooklyn.
GO: Your album is refreshing because it’s genuine country, not some kind of hipster, Po-Mo, sarcastic, satirical country. So here’s my question: Who are you to be doing genuine country?
Andy Friedman: The kind of music I’m playing only sounds like country because of my technical limitation. I only picked up a guitar three years ago.
I got into playing music because country and blues seemed easy to play, and I’ve got a lot on my mind. Life is hard enough, I use my guitar so that I can get things off my chest.
Country music — regardless of whether or not we call my music country music — isn’t about writing songs about God, chickens or farms. It’s about dealing with yourself and your surroundings in an honest and straightforward way, with whatever you got to give.
GO: The most overtly local song is “Freddy’s Backroom.” It’s bittersweet. But isn’t the story of our borough and our city that we simply pave over the old, even if history gets lost in the name of progress?
AF: I don’t think that song is a protest song, or an anti-Ratner song. Heck, I’ve shopped at Target. But I love those bars and I’m entitled to lament. That’s all it is. I wrote that song sitting at the bar on a stack of beer coasters one night, just looking around, and thinking that soon it will be gone.
GO: I don’t like the term “Hillbilly Leonard Cohen,” which is what one wag dubbed you. I don’t think of you as a hillbilly. Are you? If so, please accept my apologies.
AF: I don’t proclaim to be a “Hillbilly Leonard Cohen.” But for folks who want to know what our music is like, and what we’re all about, the marketing gurus thought that tag would shed a little bit of light on where we’re coming from. I’m certainly not a hillbilly, or a genius Canadian zen poet.
Let’s settle with the NPR quote, “a hot live act.” That works for me.
Andy Friedman and the Other Failures at Southpaw [125 Fifth Ave. at St. Johns Place in Park Slope, (718) 230-0236], 7:30 pm. Tickets: $10. For info, visit www.spsounds.com or www.andyfriedman.net.