Scott Barkan
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Scott Barkan

Miller Place, New York, United States | Established. Jan 01, 2013 | SELF

Miller Place, New York, United States | SELF
Established on Jan, 2013
Solo Americana Singer/Songwriter

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Music

Press


"American Songwriter "Flightless Bird" Album Stream"

Take a listen to Hudson Valley-based guitarist and songwriter Scott Barkan’s Flightless Bird, out January 14. It’s an appealing blend of Americana, folk and blues, with a hint of jazz and an undercurrent of melancholy, just how we like it.

“This record came together somewhat unexpectedly,” Barkan, a former in-demand sideman, tells American Songwriter. “I had been amassing a collection of tunes written over all my touring through the last year or so. Looking back at them, I realized there was a bit of an unintentional theme running through them all — self doubt, self examination, and a loose story of a relationship on its last legs — and decided I wanted to get them documented and released while they still had some fresh meaning for me. I called up my band and had the initial tracking completed within a month, and the whole package done within three.” - American Songwriter


""Little Days" Album Review"

“We wish to point out,” wrote the poet Amy Lowell in her Imagist manifesto of 1916, “that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.” Her point (or maybe it’s mine) is that nothing ages quite as quickly as the “new” and its de rigueur revolutionary rhetoric. If you’ve ever worked at a web development company, where a hyperbolic and hysterical futurism imbues every bleeding-edge utterance – even those having to do with coffee and expense reporting – then you know the truth of this. You might as well have everyone talk through a vocoder all the time.

You know, sometimes, genuine invention and innovation arrive wearing an old pair of slippers. Scott Barkan’s 2012 album Little Days comes on like the low-key musings and delicate instrumental latticework of a gentleman eccentric: maybe a little weird, but in a fond, grandfatherly way. From the deprecating title on down, the tone here is one of modest, self-effacing melancholia – whence comes, let’s face it, so much of the most achingly beautiful music. Joy is rhythm, but sadness is melody, if you want to know why there are so many sadness junkies out there.

Barkan writes warm, pretty, quiescent songs, sophisticated songs of loneliness, regret and honest, well-meaning failure, delivered in the folksy and unassuming style of a reduced-acid Randy Newman. While the songs on Little Days are indeed “little” – micro in their imagistic focus and pathologically modest in their claims – they play out leisurely, spaciously, with few clocking in at much under five minutes. This, it turns out, is a wonderful thing, because Scott Barkan is a masterful guitarist – really, a total whiz of a rare order.

It’s a slow dazzle, his guitar-playing, in some ways so easygoing that you might fail even to notice it. In form and address, his lines amble by in the familiar envelope of the blues lick, the bluegrass run, the folky fingerpicked figure. It’s toneful, it’s tasteful and it goes down smooth if you let it.

But the real, radical action is internal, in the note-to-note of it; in the harmonic implications; in the fluid, impressionistic colors; and in the high-rez melodies that are anything but feel-good standard fare. You think that you’re getting Larry Campbell, but you’re really getting Bill Frisell – if you want it. Barkan gives you the choice: a resigning, demure porch rocker or a quietly subversive avant-gardist? It’s all in there.

Listen to some of Barkan’s previous solo efforts in the instrumental trio Barky and you’ll know that he can burn, blow and skronk as well as any other self-respecting downtown scenester. But all great guitarists – perhaps even Yngwie and Satch – carry somewhere in their bag their store of “sad cowboy songs.” Usually, it is best that they should stay in the bag. Barkan, who made his name as a sideman with the excellent pan-Americana songwriter Howard Fishman, just happens to have a passel of deceptively casual, musically and lyrically deep cowboy songs to play for you, if you will have them.

He has two area appearances coming up: Saturday, June 22 at Two Boots Hudson Valley in Red Hook at 7:30 p.m., and Thursday, June 27 at Oasis in New Paltz at 10 p.m. Check out Little Days at http://scottbarkan.bandcamp.com and make a decision that we can all live with. One of the reasons that Scott Barkan deserves your attention is that he really doesn’t clamor for it at all. - Hudson Valley Almanac Weekly


"American Songwriter Interview"

ARTIST: Scott Barkan

SONG: Flightless Bird

BIRTHDATE: 11/23/79

HOMETOWN: Miller Place, NY

CURRENT LOCATION: NYC/Brooklyn/Long Island/Hudson Valley

AMBITIONS: I’ve been playing music full time for the last couple of years now, so I’m pretty happy with where I’m at, but hopefully someday I’ll be able to transition from supporting myself primarily with sideman gigs to supporting myself primarily through playing my own music. If I can do that, I’ll be a happy man!

DREAM GIG: I would love to play on Mountain Stage someday.

FAVORITE LYRIC: Definitely a line from Greg Brown, in his amazing song “Rexroth’s Daughter”: “This life is a thump-ripe melon, so sweet and such a mess…”

SONG I WISH I WROTE: Oh, god, there are so many. Maybe “Dear Someone” by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. A perfect, timeless little gem of a tune. We should all be so lucky to write one of those!

MY FAVORITE CONCERT EXPERIENCE: Bill Frisell’s “Good Dog, Happy Man” era quartet at St Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, circa 2000 or so. An amazing band in an amazing space. That concert inspired at least a decades worth of music out of me.

I WROTE THIS SONG: I wrote this song as an examination of my own self doubt and seemingly endless ability to get in my own way. Somehow the idea of using a flightless bird as a metaphor for those personal struggles popped into my head, and seemed like the perfect filter to run these ideas through. I mean, imagine having wings but not being able to fly? It’s like an evolutionary prank. I can’t imagine anything more frustrating, but at the same time we all have to make peace with what we have been given, and find a way to do the most with what we’ve got. It’s that difficult reconciliation that I have tried to capture in the song. - American Songwriter


""Flightless Bird" Album Review"

Curses, Scott Barkan! The dazzling guitarist who is also a tenderhearted-but-subversive songwriter has released an amazing new album, Flightless Bird, mere months after we reviewed his last one, Little Days. Well, as both titles suggest, themes of self-effacement and self-sabotage abound in Barkan’s jazz/folk/rock epics. Let us hope that they do not describe his career plan and marketing methods as well, but I have my doubts.

So does Barkan. On Flightless Bird, he takes self-doubt to a place of Zen acceptance. Free now of the need to apologize, deaf now to the demands and reprimands of the internalized Type A tyrant (who is the real invasive species in the pure self-doubting psyche), self-doubt turns out to be a beautiful and powerful thing – like any other irreducible essence, once it awakens to itself. When the flightless bird finally reaches this advanced stage of understanding and acquiescence, there is only one thing left that can trouble its earthbound peace: not dreams, not money, not ambition, but only the duties and dependencies of love.

Barkan courageously underplays his expert guitar on this effort. It’s about the songs. The spacious ensemble arrangements foreground Barkan’s dry, intimate vocals: a top crust of curmudgeon that fails to cover the world of feeling underneath. His best zingers are always self-directed; but this is a serious relationship album, from the naked admission of the title track to the haunted finale, “Last First Love.” Along the way, we pass through the wry masochism of “Break It to Me Hard,” the weary speak/sing of “Crank Radio” and the deeply moving bard rock of “Bad Dreams,” in which the flightless bird tries to summon the emotional wherewithal to comfort a tormented partner.

Look, if you could play guitar half as well as Scott Barkan, your skeeviest uncles with remote “showbiz connections” would be hounding you at family barbecues, and everyone would be trying to buy you new gig shirts. Maybe – just maybe – you’d have the courage to stay as true to your modest essence and its odd-bird musical imagination as Barkan does on Flightless Bird. And maybe that would be the start of something special. - Hudson Valley Almanac


"Medleyville.com Interview"

Working as a sideman for years really opened guitarist Scott Barkan’s eyes as to some of the difficulties involved with keeping a touring band together.

So when he started to focus on his own music, Barkan performed sans support.

“I could take any gig,” he recalls. “I didn’t have to check scheduling or worry about how I was going to pay everyone.”

But Barkan says those early solo acoustic gigs opened his eyes to something else: “a lot of holes in my playing.”

“Without the support of a band behind me keeping the rhythm down and filling in a lot of the space, there were a lot of things I wanted to be doing but couldn’t,” the New York-based Barkan adds. “So I needed to find another way. I didn’t want to be one of these songwriters who just strums the chords and sings on top, and that’s it. The guitar is a very important aspect of what I do, and I wanted that to also be important in the solo performance.”

Barkan started checking out various acoustic guitarists who possessed the skills he wanted: to simultaneously play bass lines and melody lines, to play chordal solos “and other things to keep the time going.” More specifically, he delved into Travis-style picking (where notes are plucked by the thumb, index and middle fingers) and the work of Tommy Emmanuel and Kelly Joe Phelps.

It took Barkan about two years before he could play a gig using the techniques he learned “without stumbling through them.” His deft style can be heard on his second solo album, Flightless Bird. Barkan spent a full day recording its basic tracks with a three-piece band in Brooklyn, N.Y., then about two weeks later, he recorded vocals and other overdubs over the course of two days in Charlottesville, Va., with engineer Stewart Myers, who mixed the album’s nine songs.

The excellent title song not only features distinct acoustic and electric guitar parts by Barkan; there’s a memorable vocal melody, too, and very detailed words.

“I’d say it was almost a songwriting exercise — this concept of using a flightless bird as a metaphor for my personal struggles, then fleshing it out into a song,” he says. “That’s not always how I operate. ‘Flightless Bird’ is something I sat and worked on in a very literary way, trying to make each line and each verse have a particular take on that concept.”

— By Chris M. Junior

Scott Barkan on tour (schedule subject to change):

* Jan. 22: Freddy’s Bar — Brooklyn, N.Y.

* Jan. 24: The Other Farm Brewing Company — Boyertown, Pa.

* Jan. 25: Byers Street Bistro — Staunton, Va.

* Jan. 27: Good Stuff Grocery — Marshall, N.C.

* Jan. 28: The One Stop — Asheville, N.C.

* Jan. 29: O’Mainnin’s — Bristol, Tenn.

* Jan. 30: Terrapin Brewing Company — Athens, Ga.

* Jan. 31: Mystery Brewing Public House — Hillsborough, N.C.

* Feb. 1: Boulevard Tavern — Charleston, W.Va.

* Feb. 2: Tree House Lodge — Washington, D.C.

* Feb. 6: Triumph Brewing Company — New Hope, Pa.

* Feb. 8: Homegrown Music Café — Port Jefferson, N.Y. - Medleyville.com


""Flightless Bird" Album Review"

SCOTT Barkan isn’t the first artist to acknowledge Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley as inspirations and he won’t be the last. But he’s one of the few that puts that admiration into compelling practice when it comes to delivering the goods musically.

His new album, Flightless Bird, weaves introspective melodic Americana lyrics with intricate guitar chords and undertones of jazz and whiskey soaked blues.

The New York-based singer-songwriter and guitarist described the ensuing collection of songs as the album he was made to make. The songs themselves share common themes of self-doubt and the search for purpose in life and has that all-important relatability that makes songs great.

Title track and opener Flightless Bird, for example, has a dusky folk-rock vibe, with some whiskey soaked piano chords to accompany the husky vocals. It declares from the outset “don’t expect too much from me, I’m a flightless bird” but then proceeds to deliver a lot more than may have been anticipated. It’s a bold move, though, to begin with an apology.

And while Richard Thompson and Leonard Cohen followers are just two of the listeners that Barkan suspects may also like him, then Bad Dreams will also play well to afficionados of Ryan Adams and artists of that nature. It’s a melodic folk-rocker of effortless enjoyability.

Barkan’s songwriting is steeped in classic values and while some songs may take a few listens to properly appreciate and other slowly unfurl their secrets and require patient attention, there’s always something interesting going on.

Leaving Here is a good example of a grower, unfolding in almost stripped back form with a stark voice declaring “I am leaving here” before slowly layering in the elements and warming up. Barkan strips things back down for the finale, but such is the clever way he layers in the instrumentals that when he returns to that “I am leaving here” you may have forgotten you were listening to the same song. In a good way.

Of note, too, are the intricate acoustics of Gone Away and the toe-tapping melodicism of Wishing Well, which showcase the intimacy and the accessibility of this particular artist at various points, not to mention the disarming lyrical honesty.

In short, Scott Barkan’s Flightless Bird is well worth checking out. It quite often soars in spite of its grounded sensibilities. - IndieLondon.co.uk


"Review of Scott's sophomore trio album,"Top Flight" The Onion's Decider.com"

"Barkan's New York trio understands that mixing rock exuberance and the chin-scratching experimentalism of avant-garde jazz is a lukewarm proposition for the average listener. The group’s debut album, after all, is titled A Study In Rocking. Barky certainly doesn’t hide the fact that its music is tricky to play—Scott Barkan’s guitar skitters across fractured scales, and drummer Brook Martinez and bassist Noah Jarrett are damnably hard to count along with. But it’s completely fun and agreeable in its weirdness, with an ear for fluid melodies instead of just abrasively scrunched-up chords." - The Onion's Decider.com


"Review of Scott's debut instrumental trio album,"A Study in Rocking" - Jambands.com"

"Barkan's instrumentals twist around each other with elastic propulsion. The band demonstrates a healthy sense of dynamics as they move through the numbers, equally as able to manage an ethereal ballad like the album-closing "Massive" as they are a twisted melodic spiral, such as the Irish-influenced "Sweet, Sweet Maggie O’Flannigan". - Jambands.com


"Review of Scott's debut instrumental trio album,"A Study in Rocking" - NewYorkRocks.com"

"...as I listen to the disc, I am reminded of the good old days, back when guitar slingers would toss out records packed with adventurous songs and sounds. It was never about the bass player, or the drummer; it was the guitar player out front, putting his chops on the line. Yeah. And while I wax nostalgic, the fluid lines of Scott Barkan are blaring out of my speakers... A number like "Ladies and Gentlemen" has a sleepy, almost cowboy feel to it... This is not guitar work like, say, Satriani or Vai, no ruthless flurry of notes here. Rather, a much more restrained and tasteful exploration of the fretboard... It flies in the face of the current crop of popular stuff, speed pop and overproduced chum that currently deadens the airwaves. Well worth hunting out." - NewYorkRocks.com


"Review of Scott's debut instrumental trio album,"A Study in Rocking" - Below Standard Magazine"

"...Barkan's complex and brainy compositions all grow from melodic and rhythmic material that is exceedingly intuitive and catchy. The first truly shining moment on the album occurs during the discordant improv section of “Ladies and Gentlemen.” At moments like these Barkan can play with all the tension and expressive dissonance of Neil Young and Crazy Horse with the advantage of being a more sensitive improviser. The strongest track on the album is “Sweet, Sweet Maggie O’Flannigan.” The song is groovy and tuneful, and a strong showcase of Barkan’s compositional and technical prowess." - Below Standard Magazine


"Review for Scott's Debut Solo Album, "Little Days" - Hudson Valley Almanac Weekly"

“We wish to point out,” wrote the poet Amy Lowell in her Imagist manifesto of 1916, “that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.” Her point (or maybe it’s mine) is that nothing ages quite as quickly as the “new” and its de rigueur revolutionary rhetoric. If you’ve ever worked at a web development company, where a hyperbolic and hysterical futurism imbues every bleeding-edge utterance – even those having to do with coffee and expense reporting – then you know the truth of this. You might as well have everyone talk through a vocoder all the time.

You know, sometimes, genuine invention and innovation arrive wearing an old pair of slippers. Scott Barkan’s 2012 album Little Days comes on like the low-key musings and delicate instrumental latticework of a gentleman eccentric: maybe a little weird, but in a fond, grandfatherly way. From the deprecating title on down, the tone here is one of modest, self-effacing melancholia – whence comes, let’s face it, so much of the most achingly beautiful music. Joy is rhythm, but sadness is melody, if you want to know why there are so many sadness junkies out there.

Barkan writes warm, pretty, quiescent songs, sophisticated songs of loneliness, regret and honest, well-meaning failure, delivered in the folksy and unassuming style of a reduced-acid Randy Newman. While the songs on Little Days are indeed “little” – micro in their imagistic focus and pathologically modest in their claims – they play out leisurely, spaciously, with few clocking in at much under five minutes. This, it turns out, is a wonderful thing, because Scott Barkan is a masterful guitarist – really, a total whiz of a rare order.

It’s a slow dazzle, his guitar-playing, in some ways so easygoing that you might fail even to notice it. In form and address, his lines amble by in the familiar envelope of the blues lick, the bluegrass run, the folky fingerpicked figure. It’s toneful, it’s tasteful and it goes down smooth if you let it.

But the real, radical action is internal, in the note-to-note of it; in the harmonic implications; in the fluid, impressionistic colors; and in the high-rez melodies that are anything but feel-good standard fare. You think that you’re getting Larry Campbell, but you’re really getting Bill Frisell – if you want it. Barkan gives you the choice: a resigning, demure porch rocker or a quietly subversive avant-gardist? It’s all in there.

Listen to some of Barkan’s previous solo efforts in the instrumental trio Barky and you’ll know that he can burn, blow and skronk as well as any other self-respecting downtown scenester. But all great guitarists – perhaps even Yngwie and Satch – carry somewhere in their bag their store of “sad cowboy songs.” Usually, it is best that they should stay in the bag. Barkan, who made his name as a sideman with the excellent pan-Americana songwriter Howard Fishman, just happens to have a passel of deceptively casual, musically and lyrically deep cowboy songs to play for you, if you will have them.

He has two area appearances coming up: Saturday, June 22 at Two Boots Hudson Valley in Red Hook at 7:30 p.m., and Thursday, June 27 at Oasis in New Paltz at 10 p.m. Check out Little Days at http://scottbarkan.bandcamp.com and make a decision that we can all live with. One of the reasons that Scott Barkan deserves your attention is that he really doesn’t clamor for it at all. - Hudson Valley Almanac Weekly


"Live Solo Performance Review - Wired.com"

I’ve been a devoted student of the guitar for twenty years now, so I feel like I can say this with some bit of authority; Scott Barkan is a force to be reckoned with... sophisticated chord voicings, complex finger picking patterns, and a flurry of blues, jazz, and folk inflected riffs performed with a ringing acoustic tone and an undeniable rhythmic drive. - Wired.com


Discography

Still working on that hot first release.

Photos

Bio

New York City tends to cast long shadows, and the challenge of living can be hard enough without the ever daunting aspect of making music that creates an impact.  Often, in the face of self doubt, an artist digs deep to find a way to convey that which resides inside of him. For Scott Barkan, making music allowed him to answer the call that life in the NYC area challenged, while providing a little self therapy in the form of fine tunes.

Since I was 13 Ive been seeing bands of all kinds in New York and I got exposed to a high caliber of music, especially jazz, that inspired me to get serious about playing guitar Barkan grew up in a Long Island suburb, the owner of an old soul with a penchant for jazz, folk, americana and rock. His earlier forays into music included an instrumental outfit called Barky, an avant/jazz/rock trio for those with ears for complex harmonies and rhythms, and later a great deal of sideman work for songwriters in NYC, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Over time, he felt his creative focus begin to shift from technical, guitar-centric instrumentals to something more akin to the songwriters he had been accompanying.

I spent about two years reworking my approach to the acoustic guitar so I could do more than just strum and sing songs. Barkan is an accomplished guitarist that prefers to separate his influences into two categories: guitar players and singer-songwriters. Its not too often that great guitar players are great songwriters, and vice versa.  Im striving to find that middle ground. He gives the guitar player nod toBill Frisell and Mississippi John Hurt and acknowledges Tom WaitsLeonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley as a few singer-songwriters he draws inspiration from.  The result is an unusual amalgamation that is both progressive and literate, a rare balancing act that manages to dig its hooks in deep.

Barkan doesnt have a set backing band but instead prefers to draw from a pool of some of the finest jazz/session players in NYC.  The full band shows can have a large amount of improvisation, and I need players who can hang with that, as well as laying down tight parts when the time comes. If the players that he wants are not available, Barkan prefers to play solo, employing his jazz/improv background to create dynamic and spontaneous live performances.

Flightless Bird is the album Barkan feels he was made to make.  With many of the songs sharing common themes of self doubt and the search for purpose in life, the album takes on an almost conceptual design.  When describing the albums title track, Barkan offers this: Flightless birds are fascinating to me because they have all the looks and tools of a regular bird, yet they cannot do what birds are meant to do. Fly.  I used that as a lense to look back at myself, look at the tools Ive been given that seem like they should be worth something, and yet, often I feel stuck and unable to move forward. This statement serves as both manifesto and explanation for the album and its existence.

Scott Barkan is humble and hopeful, a man who has an understanding of who he is and knows how to address that within the frame of his music.  His experiences become ours due to Flightless Bird and self doubt never sounded so confident.

Band Members