After the band’s successful East Coast mini-tour, Colorway’s May 14 Iron Horse engagement certainly has all the hallmarks of a homecoming show. It’s also a CD release party, celebrating the band’s recently completed sophomore studio effort, The Black Sky Sequined.
However, for Alex Johnson — whose words and compositions serve as the palette from which all Colorway music is painted — this Thursday’s show smacks of a very personal Mother’s Day.
“The title of our new album comes from a poem I found in a notebook in my mother’s handwriting,” he explains. “It was one of the last things she wrote before she died. So it seems more than a little fitting that we celebrate Black Sky on what would have been her 74th birthday, May 14.”
Recorded at Sonelab with Mark Alan Miller over a three-week period last fall, Black Sky Sequined brings two of Johnson’s life-long dreams into its fold as well.
“I got to work with the great Bob Ludwig, who mastered the disc up in Portland, Maine,” he says. “Another heavy hitter, Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman in Hollywood, helped us cut 180-gram heavyweight vinyl. So my tunes on vinyl and Bob Ludwig? It’s been a pretty boss year, indeed.”
Tix for Colorway’s CD release party are $12 in advance, $14 at the door and available at iheg.com. And if opening duo Goldwater the Second looks familiar, it’s not a figment of your imagination. Rather, its the latest project of Figment frontman Thane Thomsen, accompanied by cellist Melissa Wilson.
In other news, two area acts of note have had episodic events of late.
“I wrote this song ‘Here’s Goodbye’ when I was 18 years old, and later, my band Gone By Daylight cut the barebones acoustic version of it,” says Eric Paquette. “Here’s Goodbye” recently appeared in the soundtrack of A&E’s Married At First Sight reality show. “Hype/Extreme — which is part of Sony/ATV — have had it in their catalog for a while now, and they are responsible for getting the track placed. According to them, you can expect many more situations like this to pop up, too!”
Paquette went on to add that he will once again pop up on the local circuit as well. His new band, Polar Planet, touches down at Noho’s One Bar (onebarandgrill.com) June 6.
Similarly celebrating small screen success is one Bob Pepek, a local singer/songwriter whose track “A Little More” is featured in the slasher flick Self Storage, now available on Netflix.
“I wish there was a better story behind how it happened, but really, I work in an audio post-production house and this was literally a case where the film’s producer said he was looking for songs and my boss gave him my CD,” Pepek says.
In the interest of full disclosure — Pepek is also related to the Crawler. He’s one of 36 first cousins, who also include a Vinnie and half dozen Tonys, so what you gonna do, eh?•
Send correspondence to Nightcrawler, P.O. Box 427, Somers, CT 06071; fax to (860) 394-4262 or email garycarra@aol.com.
