Admission: FREE
Notes:
From the opening seconds of Troubled Times, the debut CD from Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter AM, you’re in a different world, as beautiful as heartbreak and enduring as memory.
Familiar echoes haunt this landscape, but these are evidence of inspiration more than imitation. Clearly there’s something new in the strong melodies, vivid textures, and eloquent insights that play throughout Troubled Times – something that, as one writer has observed, provides a “missing link” between Coldplay and Wilco, with ample dashes of Beck, Bowie, and other classic elements too elusive to identify.
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It is, in fact, the sound of AM, arguably the most original writer/performer to emerge from L.A. in a decade. Troubled Times (Defend Music) opens with the hypnotic, sing-song figure “Gone Away,” a meditation on staying mired too long in painful relationships. Troubled Times continues to lead us past images of loneliness, of “cities so bright” yet enveloped in darkness and into moments of painful candor (“I keep running away, even from the good things”). Think of these songs, then, as postcards from dark and dreamy places, where isolation and confusion aren’t dead ends but reasons to savor what life dishes out.
Singer/songwriter Chris Pierce is topping off an incredible year with the release of his much-anticipated debut album Static Trampoline on September 13, 2005 on Prana Entertainment, distributed by Jimmy Buffett’s Mailboat Records.
Pierce gained national notoriety this past year for his ballad “Are You Beautiful,” that was featured on the soundtrack for the Don Cheadle/Sandra Bullock motion picture Crash, and also in the Banana Republic ad
campaign for the Bravo series Project Runway. Entertainment Weekly noted, "Bravo's airing a Banana Republic spot featuring Chris Pierce's deliciously drowsy 'Are You Beautiful' to which we say, Bravo!"
In addition to his huge success with “Are You Beautiful,” Pierce caught SEAL’s attention when Pierce performed at a party. The next morning, Pierce was offered the opening spot on SEAL’s sold out tour. Pierce spent the past several months performing for thousands of people throughout the United States and Europe.
www.amsounds.com
www.chrispierce.com
Official Website: http://www.nectarlounge.com/pages/bandpages/am.11.12.htm