Stoutly refusing to record his passionate songs under anything less than his own terms (in his New Jersey home on a TASCAM MiniStudio), F.M. Cornog, under the name East River Pipe, has released seven albums since 1994 that can stand toe-to-toe with anything by your favorite indie rockers over the past 20 years. Although working full-time at the local Home Depot and raising a daughter with his wife may have curtailed Cornog’s recording time somewhat, the quality of the finished product remains unchanged. ERP’s latest, We Live In Rented Rooms (Merge), is further testimony to a man who refuses to play the rock-star game (form a band, tour, do photo shoots, etc.) and has come out the other side with a brilliant body of work—and with his soul intact. Cornog will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Cornog: For me, as far as writers go, first there was Franz Kafka, then there was Henry Miller, and finally came Charles Bukowski. Kafka appealed to my sense of alienation and aloneness. Miller’s arty hedonism and anti-American critiques resonated deeply with me for a time. But Bukowski wrote about the shit I saw around me every day: my reality, my mind frame. His novels and short stories armed me against a world that seemed predatory and, at times, mind-numbingly pointless. His poems gave me permission to go down in flames, because sometimes you had to destroy the old you to build the new you. When you’re in a riptide of shit, don’t fight it. Don’t even try. Just go with it. Maybe in a month or a year, you might break free and paddle toward the shore. And if you didn’t break free, and even if you got pulled under, well, that was OK, too.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gifEn61dZBc
