Paleo at Origami Vinyl on Thursday,June 30, 2011
What would you think of a guy who wrote a song every day for 365 days using a children’s guitar (because the size allowed him to play when he was driving) while living like a homeless in his car around the US? That he is an original? A freak? An accomplished songwriter?
David Strackany or Paleo saw this like a rebirth, a never-ending auto-psychoanalysis, and a personal transformation.
He is certainly one of the kind, and seeing him at Origami Vinyl where he was playing an in-store on Thursday night, I honestly did not know what to expect.
With a nasal voice, a little fragile or wobbly at times, he sang his lo-fi folk songs sitting on a chair at the top of Origami loft, and accompanied by a drummer and a bassist. Some of them had a real playful and uplifting side, some real foot-stomping numbers which seemed to turn in happy little circles like some children songs talking about adult themes.
Other ones were tuneful but less joyous, with a sort of odd and sad melancholy à la Daniel Johnston, but almost all of them had this engaging foot-tapping climate, perfectly echoed by the drumbeats.
His vibrant music brought a naïve and raw vibe so rare in 2011, going sometimes into unexpected directions, stopping and restarting, full of little rewards and often surprising, contrarily to traditional folk songs, with some humor too in the lyrics (I just got his word of play with the song ‘Holly would’). The songs seemed to depict human relationships and I guess his lyrics would require more scrutiny, but they are nowhere to find on line.
He chose his moniker after seeing a paleontology exhibit of butterflies, because he thought that songwriting was basically an old occupation (paleo = old, got it?).
His new record ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ has been out since June 21st via Partisan Records, but David Strackany will not even own one of them as he has admitted in an interview to not listening to music anymore; in fact he has even exchanged his CD collection for a tattoo… this sounds like a surrealist ad found on craiglist.
