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: Here’s more blackmail material. I love the Pet Shop Boys. Not everything they’ve ever done, but much of it. I got hooked on them back in ’86. It was their third single, “Love Comes Quickly.” From the get-go, the song has an obsessive quality to it. An ominous, underlying drone. Then Neil Tennant sings lyrics that are so true that they can make a cynical, grown man cry like a five-year-old girl on Supernanny. The message is that love is out there stalking all of us, hunting down all of us, whether we want to be hunted down or not. Even if you wall yourself off, love will find you. “Sooner or later,” sings Tennant, “this happens to everyone/To everyone.”
Video after the jump.
