With EverybodyEverybody, the Sharp Things complete their ambitious The Dogs Of Bushwick quartet
Ask Perry Serpa how many people are in the Sharp Things and the number ranges from 15 to one, not counting references to 40-piece orchestras and 21-strong string sections. The album credits for EverybodyEverybody, the fourth LP in the band’s The Dogs Of Bushwick series, list 18 players plus five chorale singers. But the New York City record-release show, on a bill with Mark Eitzel, was booked as a solo “Perry Serpa of the Sharp Things” event, due to logistical conflicts with other core band members.
“In a perfect world, we’d all be together all the time, and we’d have the money to support a seven- or eight-piece band on tour,” says Serpa from his Brooklyn home. But it’s not a perfect world, and the Sharp Things are a band in flux.
The Sharp Things formed in the late ’90s, although its genesis was in the childhood friendship between Serpa and drummer Steve Gonzalez. The band released three well-received albums of expansive chamber pop between 2002 and 2007, but then Serpa stepped back to reassess the band’s direction. The result was a “hyper-prolific burst of songwriting” of more than 40 songs in 2008 and early 2009.
The band recorded the basic tracks for all the songs and released the first installment of The Dogs Of Bushwick series in early 2013 as the album Green Is Good; the second, The Truth Is Like The Sun, followed at the end of that year. As the group was readying the third effort, Adventurer’s Inn, for release at the end of 2014, Gonzalez, who had cystic fibrosis, passed away.
“We stepped into the project, and we were gung-ho for definitely the first couple records,” says Serpa. “But then Steve passed between the second and the third one, and not to get too heavy about it, but we lost a lot of steam because of that. Understandably, there was a sort of collective depression. Personally, despite the fact that something sort of died inside, I feel he would have wanted us to finish it. And so, we did it.”
EverybodyEverybody is a wide-ranging song cycle modeled, in part, after the way the songs on side two of Abbey Road flow into one another. The band deploys chamber-pop orchestration judiciously (as on “Family Day At The Lake”), but, as on the other Bushwick albums, the group isn’t beholden to any one genre.
“Over the course of this quadrilogy—although that sounds really pretentious—we’ve really dabbled and immersed ourselves in the diversity of the songwriting,” says Serpa. “There’s songs that almost push the metal envelope. There’s songs that are really stripped down, really plaintive. Then there’s the more sort of lush, orchestral stuff that you found on our first three records. There’s the sort of retro stuff; there’s stuff that sounds like soul music; there’s electro stuff. There’s sound collages and interstitial stuff, especially on this particular record. We lost ourselves, literally; whatever we thought we were is sort of gone, anyway.”
EverybodyEverybody ends The Dogs Of Bushwick on an impressive note, and it concludes a chapter in the Sharp Things’ history. Serpa, who also works as a music publicist, has written more songs since that spurt seven years ago, including a series derived from Nick Hornby’s novel Juliet, Naked. For now, he’s taking a relaxed approach to EverybodyEverybody.
“Albums will happen when they happen; they fall together when they will,” he says. “They start to resonate with people at the weirdest time. I’m just going to relax on this one, take the industry hat o and just let it happen.” And he’s looking forward to the next period of the Sharp Things.
“Here we are, on to the next frontier, and God knows what that’s going to be,” he says. “I’m ready for it. I’m resigned to the happy fact that I’ll never stop making music until I’m put under myself. I feel good; I feel very positive about what’s next.”
—Steve Klinge
