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His gag cartoons have been published in The New Yorker, but the songs written by "hard scrabble singer-songwriter" (Time Out New York) and "erudite redneck" (Boston Globe) Andy Friedman aren't written for laughs. "Friedman has a mastery of wordy self-loathing that many white dudes with guitars would kill for," says Nashville Scene.
For the last half decade, Friedman has made a name as an "engagingly singular" (Philadelphia Inquirer) songwriter touring with The Other Failures, a gritty backing band regarded as "one of the most respected on the Brooklyn scene." (Cleveland Free Times) In the fall of 2009, Friedman introduced an acoustic ensemble and embarked on a 25-city tour with The Golden Winners, whose name provided as much of a contrast with the sound of The Other Failures as the band's warm, mellifluous arrangements -- a welcome backdrop for what the Nashville Scene referred to as "dark, singular" songwriting and "world weary" vocals.
With his latest tour, In Action: Alone On Guitar, Friedman pares it down a step further, placing the spotlight on his "fractured folk songs" (Los Angeles Times) and "shale-voiced take on spiritual decrepitude" (Hartford Advocate), while finding himself alone on stage for the first time since his three-and-a-half years touring the nation as a widely heralded "Slideshow Poet."
In fact, Friedman transitioned from traveling poet to traveling musician only after picking up the guitar and singing for the first time in his life in the spring of 2005, shortly before recording his first album, Taken Man (City Salvage Records / Rounder Europe), the title track of which found itself at #30 on the New York Post's "207 Best Songs To Download in 2007." Other songwriters to appear on that extensive list included Amy Winehouse ("Rehab" No. 1), Neil Young ("Dirty Old Man" No. 65), and Bruce Springsteen ("Radio Nowhere" No. 114).
Friedman released his second album, Weary Things (City Salvage Records/Kindred Rhythm) in the winter of 2009, which garnered widespread critical praise, a performance on NPR's coveted Mountain Stage, and a feature interview on XM's Bob Edwards Show, further solidifying his growing reputation as a "dusty, paint-splattered Americana sage." (Rochester News & Democrat) Despite this, and along with only a handful of other albums (including releases by Tom Waits and Chuck Prophet) The Associated Press highlighted Weary Things among The Best Overlooked Albums Of 2009. "Friedman can write a lyric and deliver it," declared Stephen Wine. "He is not to be overlooked, that's for sure."
Friedman's "hard-tack country originals" were described in The New Yorker as "the mark of a true artist," while NoDepression.com called his songwriting "unforgettable." Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor, in a poem written about Friedman's sophomore album, called his record a "certified, genuine American tune." Indie-folk icon Sufjan Stevens proclaimed, "I think the world of Andy Friedman. I've always wanted to be Andy Friedman." In the album's liner notes, David Gates -- the author, Pulitzer-finalist, and former senior arts editor for Newsweek -- sets the tone for Weary Things. "What [Friedman] sees through his windshield isn't Greil Marcus's Old Weird America," he writes, "but the weird, new America where the pastoral is no longer pure.?
"Andy Friedman is not exactly one of those musicians you play while you're paying your bills or cleaning the house," says NPR, "his songs demand that you sit down and listen to them, which is why he is such a hot live act." While his songs are anything but funny, Friedman has published over a dozen gag cartoons in The New Yorker under the pseudonym Larry Hat. As an award-winning illustrator published under his own name, Friedman's portraits of cultural figures appear regularly in literally hundreds of magazines and newspapers worldwide, including recent covers for the New York Times Magazine and The New Republic.
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