“Corey Dargel: The Challenges of Empathy” in the April 2012 issue of New Music Box
Composer, singer, songwriter Corey Dargel is featured in the cover story of this month’s New Music Box. Here he is in conversation with Frank J. Oteri, published April 01, 2012
All of Corey Dargel’s output could potentially appeal to an extremely broad audience, even his most outré experiments in empathy. At the same time, his seemingly simple early songs are filled with embedded complexities and reward with focused listening time and again. Like many other difficult to categorize music creators of his generation, Dargel consistently defies classification.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan.
Read a transcript of the entire conversation at NewMusicBox:
New Song, “Mr. No Regrets,” Available in ESOPUS Magazine
Corey was invited by the twice-yearly arts magazine, ESOPUS, to contribute an exclusive new song, “Mr. No Regrets,” for the magazine’s compilation CD, “Fear Itself,” included in Issue #17. For this CD, each artist contributed an original song based on readers’ submissions about their idiosyncratic, irrational fears. You can preview Issue #17 as well as tracks from the CD here. ESOPUS is available via subscription as well as at select retail locations nationwide.
Interview and Exclusive Track on Minnesota Public Radio
In advance of Corey’s November 9-10 performances in St. Paul, Classical Minnesota Public Radio broadcast an extended interview about Every Day Is the Same Day and Thirteen Near-Death Experiences as well as an exclusive live recording of “Your Discompassionate Arms” featuring Dargel on vocals and Todd Reynolds on violin and digital looping.
Listen to the interview and the live recording here.
Review in the Star-Tribune
The Twin Cities’ music journalist Claude Peck reviews Corey’s November 9th performance in the Star Tribune. Full article here.
“This is my happy song.”
That was composer/singer Corey Dargel’s intro to “Impression of Me,” one of the 21 original songs he performed Wednesday night in St. Paul. (The program was repeated Thursday night.)
As for the rest? They could be described by various adjectives — bitter, broken-hearted, witty, depressed, deadpan, conflicted, anxious, sardonic, self-pitying, clever, vulnerable, confessional — but not “happy.”
Dargel, Texas-born, Oberlin-educated and New York-addressed, delivered his “Song Cycles” in two parts. To start, he and violinist Todd Reynolds (using electronic looping) did a group of songs about breakups, revenge fantasies, clinical (more…)
Q2 Live w/Mos Def and Brooklyn Philharmonic
Mos Def and Brooklyn Phil conductor Alan Pierson
Airdate: October 19, 2011
WNYC’s New Sounds Live and Q2 Music present a live recording of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center performing music by Mos Def, Frederic Rzewski, Lev Zhurbin, David T. Little and Corey Dargel. The concert features a preview of the orchestra’s upcoming season, the first under the energized stewardship of their new conductor, Alan Pierson. The audio is available here until October 19th, 2011.
The program features a fresh, multidimensional approach to vocal repertoire with the versatile hip hop-icon Mos Def joining the Brooklyn Philharmonic on (more…)
New York Times Publishes Profile of Corey Dargel
- Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Steve Smith wrote a feature profile on Corey Dargel for the Sunday, May 1st, 2011, edition of the New York Times. As a bonus, the online version of the article includes streaming and downloadable versions of Corey’s new EP Last Words from Texas. Below is the text from the article, and here is a PDF of a scan of the newspaper.
A VOICE WHERE ROMANCE AND DYSFUNCTION MEET
by STEVE SMITH
“ARE you really going to ask me that?” the composer and vocalist Corey Dargel inquired near the end of a sprawling conversation one recent evening, his measured tone briefly betraying impatience and resignation. What bothered him was being asked how he felt about his constant characterization as an artist whose work concerns bridging the gap between classical and popular music. Though not inaccurate, the description has become convenient shorthand, warding off deeper investigation of his work.
“It’s not something I think about,” Mr. Dargel said. “When I sit down to write, I don’t (more…)
Live Chat on Q2′s “The New Canon” with host Olivia Giovetti
Monday, beginning at 4pm, you can listen to Q2′s The New Canon with host Olivia Giovetti. The program features music by Corey Dargel and Phil Kline. During the broadcast, you can participate in a live chat with Corey and Olivia. Here’s the info from Q2′s site:
Eine Kline Nachtmusik: Phil Kline and Corey Dargel Get Vocal
Monday, May 02, 2011
If Palestrina had a boombox, he would be Phil Kline. The man who has turned the Lower East Side into a concert hall every December as part of Unsilent Night and has set to music texts from the Zippo lighters of Vietnam War soldiers also, it turns out, has a scary talent for writing sacred music.
Our parent station WNYC proved this in 2006 when they commissioned Kline’s John the Revelator, a modern mass designed for the cathedral-like space of the Winter Garden. And even though I’m of the wrong religious persuasion, I’ve been finding special resonance in this work coming off of Holy Week (and, for my team, Passover).
On May 3, Kline adds another feather in his cap when he curates NYFOS Next, a New Music arm of the New York Festival Song and part of the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Movado Hour. Joining Kline are three generations of contemporary composers with an alarming talent for writing vocal works, including Meredith Monk, friend of the show David Lang and our postmodern Schubert, Corey Dargel.
Dargel joins us online at 4 pm for a live chat about writing for the voice and performing as a vocalist — and how those two components coalesce in works like Removable Parts, which was featured on Dargel’s 2010 album for New Amsterdam, Someone Will Take Care of Me. Join us in window below, tweet your comments and/or questions beforehand with the hashtag #q2new, or leave them as comments at the bottom of the page.
We’ll hear Removable Parts — an opus that is the culmination of extensive research on Dargel’s part and speaks to how we navigate relationships (not to mention art song) in the 21st Century. It’s one half of Dargel’s splendid 2010 release, Someone Will Take Care of Me, which is Q2′s Album of the Week (you can nab a free download from this disc below). Also on the menu is a special live recording from the 2009 Bang on a Can Marathon of Kline’s John the Revelator, designed to appeal to saints and sinners alike.
Composers at Play Interview
As part of his Composers at Play podcast, Sophocles Papavasilopoulos talks with Corey Dargel about human development theories, escaping South Texas with your soul intact, the pros and cons of growing up gay with and without the internet, the power of detachment as a form of expression, and more. You can stream the interview below, or you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.
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Live Recording of Other People’s Love Songs on WQXR/Q2
The amazing Damon Whittemore of Valvetone recorded and mixed the entire Ecstatic Music Festival Marathon concert for WQXR/Q2. If you go there, you can listen to each act. Here’s a stream of my set, performing Other People’s Love Songs with NOW Ensemble and accordionist Nathan Koci:
photo by Stephen Taylor
Franz Nicolay on Someone Will Take Care of Me
Franz Nicolay of The Hold Steady and World/Inferno Friendship Society founded the new-music collective Anti-Social Music, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2010; and is co-leader of the Balkan-jazz quartet Guignol, whose Fight Dirty came out in 2009. Also in 2009, he released his solo debut Major General (Fistolo/Decor) and vinyl-only EP St. Sebastian of the Short Stage (Team Science); and in early 2010 the short-story collection Complicated Gardening Techniques (Julius Singer Press). He made Luck & Courage in Brooklyn in two weeks in spring 2010, with producer Jim Keller (Willie Nelson, Franz Ferdinand). After completing the new album, he spent the past summer as a touring member of agit-punk band Against Me!.
On the indie-music reviews site Adequacy.net, Nicolay writes about his top 5 albums of 2010. This is what he says about Corey’s album Someone Will Take Care of Me:
This is a two-disc set from the post-classical splash-makers New Amsterdam Records, which compiles two of Dargel’s song cycles: “Removable Parts,” a collaboration with pianist Kathy Supove on the topic of voluntary amputation; and “Thirteen Near-Death Experiences,” an ironic meditation on hypochondria and pathology with the International Contemporary Ensemble. It’s the latter that interests me most, in which Dargel’s customary soundworld – electronic cross-rhythms, skittering piano obbligato, and deadpan despair that lies somewhere at the intersection of art song, early Magnetic Fields, and Momus – is re-scored for acoustic chamber ensemble and drum kit, and holds itself, coyly, just short of anthemic. (Or maybe I’m just into flutes this year?)
Franz Nicolay photo by Miles Kerr
The Big City and kleineKultur on HOLD YOURSELF TOGETHER
As part of a substantial piece on a variety of singing events over the past few weeks, George Grella at The Big City writes the following about the premiere performance of Corey’s new song cycle Hold Yourself Together:
That truly amazing variety was on display at the Vital Vox 2010 festival, held at the Issue Project Room. In the two (out of a total of three) nights I attended I saw a dazzling range of singing. At the most familiar end was Corey Dargel’s premiere of a group of songs, Hold Yourself Together, accompanied by WIll Smith and James Moore. Dargel’s phrases and the range of his accompaniments keep slowing extending and expanding, to good effect. The music is at times blippy, at times crunchy, with some baroque filligree in “Your Profound Self-Doubt,” while Dargel croons out jaundiced but still optimistic lyrics. His songs are about the miscommunications of modern life, both inadvertent and deliberately used by couples to misunderstand each other. Ultimately, and with a sweet and almost regretful tenderness, they accept and embrace love, possibly and actually.
Read the full post here.
On her blog kleineKultur, Meg Wilhoite has posted the following video of excerpts from the performance. [Corey, James, and Wil will perform Hold Yourself Together at the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra's Music Off The Walls concert on January 23rd, 2011, at the Brooklyn Museum.]
Brooklyn Philharmonic Selects Corey as Composer Fellow
Brooklyn Philharmonic is proud to announce Corey Dargel, Matthew Mehlan, and Jeremiah Lockwood as its Composer Fellows for the 2008-2009 Season.
The Composer Mentorship Program, now entering its fourth cycle, celebrates and brings to light composers whose work reflects the energy, power, and pulse of Brooklyn. Acclaimed by Meet the Composer as a national model, the program is designed to foster new voices from backgrounds that reflect the diversity of our community, and BPO encourages composers from all non-orchestral backgrounds to apply. Mentored by acclaimed composer Randall Woolf, this season three composers will be propelled into the classical community and receive training in orchestral composition and community engagement. The Composer Mentorship Program will include commission(s) of a new chamber music work, a string orchestra reading session, recording’s of the composers’ commissions, and involvement with BPO Education and Community Programs. Beginning during the 2009-2010 Season, the Composer Mentorship Program was expanded to include the Music Off The Walls, the BPO concert series at the Brooklyn Museum. The Fellows are asked to co-curate, with the guidance of Randall Woolf and the BPO Artistic Staff, a Music Off The Walls concert inspired by concurrent Brooklyn Museum exhibits. World Premier performances of the Fellow’s chamber ensemble commissions will take place at each composer’s respective concert.
Music Off The Walls is a truly cross-disciplinary series that creates an experiential conversation between the visual arts and music. BPO musicians in varying ensembles along with guest soloists perform chamber repertoire ranging from ranging from classical composers to today’s undiscovered talents. These concerts take place in the Brooklyn Museum’s 460-seat Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium. To encourage audience members to explore the museum, and in particular the afternoon’s paired exhibit, tickets to the concerts include free museum admission and a pre-concert gallery tour.
The Brooklyn Philharmonic, now in its 57th season, is at the forefront of defining what it means to be a twenty-first century urban orchestra. Dedicated to innovation, artistic collaboration, arts education, and engaging audiences, the Brooklyn Phil is active in Brooklyn’s vibrant music scene and provides musical experiences for people of all ages. For the past five decades, the Brooklyn Philharmonic has played a leading role in the presentation of innovative and thematic programming, and in 2009 received its 22nd ASCAP Award for “Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music.”
The Brooklyn Philharmonic has been led by an illustrious succession of visionaries, including Michael Christie, Robert Spano, Dennis Russell Davies, Lukas Foss, and Siegfried Landau. Devoted to bringing music to the entire Brooklyn community, Brooklyn Philharmonic serves the borough’s cultural and educational communities through partnerships with the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, BRIC, and many Brooklyn schools. The Brooklyn Philharmonic is continually expanding its role as a leader in music education and as a critical cultural resource for economically disadvantaged children and at-risk youth. Current initiatives include School Time Concerts, curriculum-based composing workshops at elementary schools, in-school instrumental coaching and violin instruction, and an annual student ensemble contest.
Composer Mentor Randall Woolf was born in Detroit. He discovered classical music for himself in college, having spent high school in the usual garage-rock bands. He studied composition privately from 1982 to 1987, taking 3 years of counterpoint and harmony lessons in the Schoenberg tradition with noted microtonalist and jazz visionary Joseph Maneri. He studied orchestration and composition privately with David Del Tredici. In 1989, he was a fellow at Tanglewood, studying with Lukas Foss and Oliver Knussen. He resides in Brooklyn with his wife, pianist and ranteuse Kathleen Supové. His music ranges from the purely traditional classical media such as string quartet and orchestra to the entirely electronic and theatrical, though he is happiest between these extremes. He is frequently performed throughout the United States by groups such as the Seattle Symphony, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Bang On A Can/SPIT Orchestra, Northern Kentucky Symphony, California EAR Unit, American Composers Orchestra, Fulcrum Point, twisted tutu, Music at the Anthology, Basso Bongo, Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony, New Millennium Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Boston Musica Viva, American Baroque, Dogs of Desire chamber orchestra, Northern Kentucky Symphony, Meridian Arts Ensemble, and the Society for New Music, among others.
Born in Texas in 1977, Corey Dargel is a Brooklyn-based composer, writer, and singer whose gentle assault on pop and classical idioms creates a tension that pervades his music. The New Yorker magazine calls him “a baroquely unclassifiable” composer of “ingenious nouveau art songs” and according to Gramophone magazine, he has “a compositional sense guaranteed to keep close listeners on their toes.” Dargel earned a bachelor’s degree in music composition at Oberlin Conservatory where he studied with John Luther Adams, Pauline Oliveros, and Brenda Hutchinson. His music has been profiled by Kurt Andersen (Studio 360), Alison Stewart (Weekend Edition), and David Garland (Spinning On Air). Dargel has released two solo albums, Less Famous Than You (2006, Use Your Teeth) and Other People’s Love Songs (2008, New Amsterdam Records). His third album, Someone Will Take Care of Me (2010, New Amsterdam Records & Naxos of America) is a double-CD set, featuring performances by the classical chamber group International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), David T. Little (drums), and Kathleen Supove (piano). It is comprised of song cycles adapted from Dargel’s critically acclaimed music-theater pieces, Thirteen Near-Death Experiences and Removable Parts, which won the 2007 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Performance-Art Production and was hailed by the New York Times as “almost perversely pleasurable… with an intelligent grace that is as moving as it is impressive.” Dargel has received awards and residencies from the MAP Fund, Meet The Composer’s Creative Connections program, the American Composers Forum, the Jerome Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the MacDowell Colony, New Dramatists, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer, and filmmaker Matthew Mehlan is based in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from Chicago, he received a Bachelor of Music from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music with a major focus on Technology In Music and Related Arts (TIMARA). Since 2003 he has been performing and recording with his band Skeletons, who it has been said “are one of the few contemporary bands who can legitimately be called ‘original’.”(Xlr8r). Skeletons have toured the US, Europe and UK extensively and released albums on Shinkoyo (the art and music group Matthew co-founded), Ghostly International (http://ghostly.com), and Tomlab (http://tomlab.com). In 2009, the group began performing as a 12-18 piece Big Band to explore the outer limits of their ideas.
Jeremiah Lockwood, son of composer Larry Lockwood and the grandson of the legendary Cantor Jacob Konigsberg, began his musical career playing on the streets and subways of Manhattan performing with Piedmont Blues master Carolina Slim. Jeremiah is the front man for The Sway Machinery, an ensemble with a unique sound and focus on mining the historic Cantorial music tradition as a jumping of point for creating unique and exciting new music. The Sway Machinery released its debut album, Hidden Melodies Revealed, on JDub Records in April of 2009. A track from Hidden Melodies Revealed was featured on the hit TV show Weeds. The Sway Machinery performed at the legendary Festival of the Desert in Mali in January 2010 and recorded a new album in Africa, which is currently in post-production. In 2007, Jeremiah was awarded the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists to develop his unique concept for a concert-event to celebrate Rosh HaShana, the Jewish New Year, through a re-interpretation of the liturgical music of the holiday. In addition to his work as performer, Jeremiah is a composer for film and theater, scoring the Adam Vardi film Mendy, a documentary piece on Israeli artist Miriam Cabessa, and working extensively with director Paul Andrejco’s Puppet Heap production company. Jeremiah has also toured extensively as guitarist with Balkan Beat Box. Jeremiah’s blues-oriented solo album, American Primitive, was released by Vee-Ron Records in 2006. Jeremiah is currently artist-in-residence at the Jewish Daily Forward, creating a series of songs based on historic Chassidic Nigunim. Jeremiah Lockwood lives in Brooklyn with his wife Shasta and their sons Moses Lion and Jacob Ulysses.
The L Magazine Reviews GIT ALONG LIL DOGGIES
Benjamin Sutton on Laboratory Theater‘s Git Along Lil Doggies in The L Magazine:
Git Along Lil Doggies…seems at once full and minimal. A never-ending wind rumbles over the Brick Theater’s sound system, one of many elements to evoke David Lynch films; plucky cowboy songs punctuate the performance. Gus Van Sant movies, Sam Shepard plays, Leon Golub paintings and Cormac McCarthy novels constantly come to mind, among other things for the unpredictable juxtaposing of moments of sweet humor and intense violence, and frequent deviations into the telling of tangential stories. The most concise descriptor may be to call this fragmented experimental performance a psychosexual post-Western postmodern composition with cowboys.
Read the full review here.
Git Along Lil Doggies runs through October 30th at The Brick theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Photos from Corey’s Mobtown Modern Performance
Photos from Corey Dargel’s October 6, 2010, performance at Mobtown Modern in Baltimore are now up courtesy of Robert McIver Photography. Corey performed Removable Parts with pianist (more…)
Baltimore City Paper on Corey Dargel
Lee Gardner at Baltimore’s City Paper writes about Corey’s music as a preview of the October 6th Mobtown Modern Concert Series performance:
Corey Dargel is a composer, but not the bust-on-a-baby-grand kind, or even the check-out-my-requiem-for-two-zithers-and-a-dehumidifier kind. First of all, he specializes in songs (art songs, if you must), and not only that, he sings them himself too. And his songs are about, say, hypochondria, or they’re written to order as gifts from one significant other to the, uh, other, and they neatly manage to avoid that whole po-faced art-song thing. Further demonstrating that contemporary music isn’t just what you assume it is, the Mobtown Modern concert series welcomes Dargel to the Windup Space tonight for a performance of bits from his Removable Parts (a theater piece about body integrity identity disorder, aka people who want to cut off their own limbs) as well as selections from Every Day Is the Same (songs about clinical depression). Fun.
Here’s the link to the write-up on City Paper’s site.
NY Times Reviews the MATA Benefit Concert
In the September 29th edition of the New York Times, Allan Kozinn writes about Corey Dargel’s performance (with Kathleen Supové and Courtney Orlando) on the MATA Benefit concert that took place September 27th:
Corey Dargel’s songs also question the distinction between high and low art. His involved, delicately refined instrumental writing — performed here by the pianist Kathleen Supové and the violinist Courtney Orlando, in some cases with computer tracks — is offset by his arch, cabaret-tinged vocal style and the quirkiness of his texts. The songs he performed here were laconic observations on disasters (“The Opposite of Love”) and meditations on subjects like limb amputation (the central fascination of his “Removable Parts” cycle), and, typically, he made the grisly seem oddly charming.
Read the full review HERE.
Interview on KALW San Francisco’s “Then & Now” with Sarah Cahill
Sarah Cahill is a pianist and music critic whose radio program was named “One of the Hundred Best Things in the Bay Area” by Citysearch online magazine. Sarah’s KALW program, called “Then & Now,” focuses on the relationships between classical music and new music, encompassing interviews with musicians and composers, historical performances, and exciting recordings outside the mainstream. Sarah welcomed Corey Dargel to KALW’s studio for a live interview on her program August 22, 2010. Listen:
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Ctrl-click or right-click HERE to download the mp3 file.
Corey’s Interview with MikeyPod
The always enjoyable MikeyPod podcast recently featured a full episode devoted to Corey’s album Someone Will Take Care of Me and an extended conversation with Corey and host Michael Harren. Stream the episode here or (better yet) subscribe to the podcast’s feed, download the episode, and listen at your convenience.
Frank J. Oteri on Someone Will Take Care of Me
Frank J. Oteri writes about Corey’s new album Someone Will Take Care of Me at New Music Box:
For nearly a decade Corey Dargel has been making extraordinarily weird musical concepts sound natural and almost mainstream by packaging them as popular songs. Irregular meters and phrases, totalist polyrhythms, and unstable harmonic movement are commonplace throughout his oeuvre… But all of these advanced musical techniques are never ends in and of themselves; in fact, since these devices serve his songs so well, a casual listener might not even realize all of what’s going on in Dargel’s electronically generated song accompaniments… Ultimately Dargel’s pop-song trappings are a façade that lulls you into a false sense of security as a listener; before you know it, you’re bopping your head to a very complex series of beats, humming a melody that doesn’t quite line up with those beats, and thinking about the world in a way that you most likely would never have thought about it before.
But if Corey Dargel’s output has always been the work of a singer-songwriter who engages in heady compositional strategies, he completely ups the ante with…the double-CD Someone Will Take Care of Me…
Read the full essay here.
REMOVABLE PARTS the “absolute highlight” of Opera Grows in Brooklyn
Parterre Box praised Corey Dargel’s Removable Parts, calling it the “absolute highlight” of the Opera Grows in Brooklyn concert on July 9th, 2010 at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, NY:
The absolute highlight of the evening for me was an amazing work about love and voluntary amputation. Composer and singer/songwriter Corey Dargel and pianist Kathleen Supové presented their song cycle/rock show/performance art piece titled “Removable Parts,” featuring Mr. Dargel singing, his voice oddly similar to Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie. The texts, also written by Mr. Dargel, have the most jarring combination of sweetly true love and disgusting details of the wish for amputation of healthy limbs. The experience was an intense, heartfelt, funny, emotional piece of contentious individuality and somehow without any hint of sarcasm.
Interview with Jayson Greene & Album Review by John Schaefer on eMusic.com
On the occasion of the release of his new album, Someone Will Take Care of Me, Corey Dargel recently sat down with eMusic’s Jayson Greene to discuss a few of his own songs as well as a head-spinningly diverse “Jukebox Jury” that makes stop-offs at Gary Numan, Magnetic Fields, Xiu Xiu, and Lotte Lenya.
You can read the full interview HERE.
In addition, eMusic’s John Schaefer reviews the album and gives it an “Editor’s Pick.” For those who are not eMusic members, here is the text of that review:
Intimate, witty, and often kinda creepy, Corey Dargel’s songs strike an uneasy balance between art and pop. Using some top-shelf musicians from New York’s contemporary music scene and singing in a pop style (usually multitracked), Dargel spins quirky, lyrical tales of dysfunction and delusion. Someone Will Take Care of Me is a reassuring title for an album full of songs about people in desperate need of reassurance. In Thirteen Near-Death Experiences, the first of the album’s two song cycles, Dargel is accompanied by ICE, the International Contemporary Ensemble, featuring drummer David T Little, for a series of skittering pop-inflected compositions. Imagine Franz Schubert composing a song cycle about hypochondria after listening to AM radio Top 40 and studying Thelonius Monk, and you might be prepared for “Twelve Year Old Scotch,” or “Sometimes a Migraine Is Just a Migraine,” or what I’m willing to bet is the first-ever art-song about Ritalin.
Even more unnervingly accessible is the second song cycle, Removable Parts, which takes a familiar love-song trope to its absurdist extreme. Old images of love hurting, blinding and tearing out one’s heart are here turned into songs in which voluntary amputations are a metaphor for ways to deal with a lover’s distance, or a lover’s unwelcome closeness, or the singer’s own self-doubts and lack of confidence. “Hooked For Life,” where the singer’s hands have been replaced by hooks, is a particularly clever and unsavory song: “You’ll feel obliged to be sympathetic/ You’ll let me hold you/ Even though you won’t want to.” “Toes” and “Hands” are equally unwholesome but winning compositions, and the finale, “Everybody Wannabe,” is as catchy as it is disturbing — which is to say, very catchy. Dargel accompanies himself with a variety of electronic keyboards, and the gifted new music specialist Kathleen Supove plays piano — a neat, if distant, echo back to the old voice-and-piano tradition of the classical song-cycle.
The Official iTunes Review of “Someone Will Take Care of Me”
Here is the official review of Someone Will Take Care of Me from the iTunes Store. Click here to open in iTunes.
In the 21st century the line that separates classical and pop continues to blur. How different are, say, Nico Muhly and the Dirty Projectors? Or Sufjan Stevens and the vocalist/composer Corey Dargel, who released the impressive Someone Will Take Care of Me in 2010? There’s an echo of the late, great Arthur [Russell]’s work in Dargel’s art songs. Each half of this double album presents a set of pieces that are linked thematically. On “[Thirteen] Near Death Experiences,” Dargel, joined by the International Contemporary Ensemble and drummer David T. Little, explores hypochondria and other issues. The second set, “Removable Parts,” which finds Dargel accompanied by pianist Kathleen Supové, looks at the unlikely subject of voluntary amputation. Herky-jerky rhythms and catchy string figures mark “Touch Me Where it Counts,” which expresses the erotic feelings of a patient for his doctor. “Ritalin” deals with the flattening effect of the drug as handclaps interact with ensemble playing. “Fingers” evokes a stranger, more complicated Stephin Merritt song, and in its own way, it’s just as catchy.
Interview on the Naxos blog
Go here for the full interview.
Corey Dargel is known for his sweet yet psychologically complex electro-pop songs, exemplified by his previous albums Other People’s Love Songs and Less Famous Than You. For his upcoming double-CD album,Someone Will Take Care of Me, Dargel delves deeper into the darker realms of the psyche, and he utilizes acoustic instruments for the first time in nearly a decade. What do these changes signify about Dargel’s own psyche? I counseled him about the album, and I think we made several breakthroughs. Below is a transcript of our conversation. You can download two FREE TRACKS from the album at New Amsterdam Records.
Matt Marks: Your album Someone Will Take Care of Me consists of two CDs of two song cycles, Thirteen Near-Death Experiences and Removable Parts. Do you consider (more…)
Interview with Andrew Patner on WFMT Chicago
On March 22, 2010, Corey was Andrew Patner‘s guest for the full hour of Patner’s radio show Critical Thinking on WFMT Chicago. The episode features the very first broadcast of full songs from the forthcoming album, Someone Will Take Care of Me (out May 25).
You can find the show’s feed/podcast here & the official WFMT show site here. The episode featuring Corey is dated 03/22/2010
Andrew Patner (pictured) is the classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times; a Critic-at-Large with 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and wfmt.com; and the author of I.F. Stone: A Portrait(Pantheon, 1988; Anchor pb, 1990)
Click the play button below to stream the full episode.
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