Photo by Keziah Suskin
Brett Newski recently discovered a bunch of old songs he wrote when he was in high school. They were dispatches from what he calls “my 16-year-old emo self,” the angst-ridden recordings of a mopey, bullied teenager, and he didn’t recognize much of his current self in them.
These days Newski is about as far away from a tortured soul as musicians get. A chipper songwriter from the Rivers Cuomo/Ben Folds school of never taking even his serious songs too seriously, he fills his latest EP Hi-Fi D.I.Y. with plucky, jumpy tunes about marching to the beat of your own drum while taking some loving digs at indie rock’s cooler-than-thou ethos. “We could be heroes, but I wanna be a weirdo!” he wails over a cheerful power-pop riff on “Move to Berlin.” He opens “D.I.Y. (Live From Dano’s House)” with a kazoo. The whole song plays like an attempt to crack up his friends in the studio.
“I’m D.I.Y. / I’m punk as fuck,” he sings on that track, and while the “punk as fuck” boast is clearly tongue in cheek, coming as it does just moments after a kazoo, he’s serious about the D.I.Y. thing.
“We consider ourselves to be a pretty epic D.I.Y. band,” Newski says. “Well, I guess it’s just a one-man band, but my manager Danimal tours with me and does the sound at our shows, so he’s the other half of the band. We play 220 times a year, all over the globe, and set up a lot of the shows ourselves. We have a small label in Europe that does well and a couple small booking agents in different territories, but the majority of it is us doing the heavy lifting with our little chicken legs.”
It helps to have a sunny disposition when you spend that much of your life on the road. To pass the time on their latest tour—a four-month commitment that Newski admits began to feel like too much in its final weeks—he and Danimal filmed a weekly video tour blog called “Crusty Adventures,” where the two shared advice, took in some sights and just generally goofed around. Touring can be a humbling experience, Newski says, but it pays off if you stick with it.
“When you’re just getting started, you’ve got to be ready to just be absolutely crushed for your first and second year on the road, but those really bad shows do go away, and things get better,” he says. “It’s all about morale. If you can keep your Morale-O-Meter relatively high, and keep your Money-O-Meter in the black, then you should be fine.”
To that end, he got some advice from Hi-Fi D.I.Y. producer Victor DeLorenzo, who, as the former drummer for the Violent Femmes, has decades of experience traveling the world playing peppy songs designed to make people feel good.
“He’s like the most positive dude of all time,” Newski says of DeLorenzo. “I still go over to his house when I need a morale boast, or wisdom about the long, winding road. I think when you go out on your own and tour like I do, you’re floating in outer space in a sense, and you can lose a grip on what’s reality as you used to know it. So it’s good to have a wise, third-party perspective to reel you back in.”
Newski also credits DeLorenzo for the EP’s loose, feel-good vibe.
“It was just like hanging out in your buddy’s house,” Newski says of the recording sessions. “Vic is a legend, and he was just the fun captain. He made sure everyone was having a good time. I think why we clicked so well is he wasn’t there to dial into any formulas or to mathematically calculate what’s going to sell the most records, or what psychology is going to get the most people to buy in. We were just there to make some rock ’n’ roll songs, and that’s why it was fun.”
Brett Newski plays an EP release show on Saturday, Feb. 20 at the Cactus Club with the Zach Pietrini Band and Detlef Schremph at 9 p.m.
