Biography

Chicago. Sweet home before Alabama grabbed that title with its smudgy, hard hands and its affinity for putting aircraft on poles. Brandon Seyferth (pronounced cypher), a newcomer here, is releasing his first EP in March of 06 under the pseudo-band-name Hot Heels Records.

After coming off a stretch of being assigned to the fame-seeking dilettantes who crawl over the music and art scenes of so many cities, Im suspicious of him even as he walks in to meet me at the diner he had suggested on the corner of California and Milwaukee. That suspicion was my fault, my bitterness, and I knew it. But through all the pop stars and television smothering that presses down on us I miss artists. Real artists. People with something to say aside from hey everybody, look at me! I believed in his music. I was waiting for him to fall short. A waitress interrupts our hellos with a flashed smile and a pot of coffee as Brandon sits down, keeping his leather jacket on, setting a collection of poems by Joseph Brodsky and John Steinbecks East of Eden in the seat next to him. I wasnt impressed that he brought books. A lot of people do that. I would learn over the next hour however that Brandon is not a lot of people, and that I would not be disappointed.

He looks out the window. Its starting to get cold. I knew enough about him already to know he is twenty-six, an award-winning poet at twenty-two. Nothing about how he looked told me that he had wandered China without a penny or a plan for more than a year, or that he had lived in an oxygen tent for the first part of his life. Nothing told me he had worked and traveled the U.S. East Coast with a carnival, but he had. I would find out later that night that seeing him perform makes his eclectic background stick out in a distinctly educated American way. Live, hes part jazz hustle-bustle, part folk-poet, looks like James Dean or Jack Kerouac, will play a punk-influenced song next to a Motown one, make them both sound like songs drug out from Woody Guthrie's Great Depression and clap an immediacy on them with lyrics that look at present times and hearts with a clear and honest eye. His songs are catchy, relevant, mature, and he never lets you know whats coming next- on guitar hell get you watching his right hand and slap you with the left even if you choose to turn a closed ear. He is a professional and an artist who cares deeply about his audience. In conversation, he is perpetually and frustratingly the devils advocate.

Yeah, there was snow on the ground yesterday, I said. I spun my coffee cup in place and asked him about his childhood. He answered with a string of lies. I called him on it. He chuckled.

I hadnt been interested in folk music until I came to Chicago and saw some cats from the Old Town School playing standards at an open mic. I had been into soul, blues, motown, rockabilly, jazz before. Jazz taught me to improvise, soul taught me to make damned sure that improvisation didnt make the night sterile. I picked up playing the harmonica on a rack about six months ago and started getting compared to Bob Dylan all the time. I liked that- took it as a compliment. I figured Id take it as a cue to start lying my ass off- seemed to help him, start of his career... there's a great line by Joseph Brodsky in one of his poems: "I proudly admit that my finest ideas are second-rate, may the future take them as trophies of my struggle against suffocation." I think my generation can relate to that- we live in a homeless land.

Brandon pulls out a roll of quarters from his left jacket pocket to pay the bill, smirks at me. I chuckle, "let me get this one."

-James Venerky