Pure Volume Premieres Big Harp's "Waiting For Some Drunk"

Pure Volume Premieres Big Harp's "Waiting For Some Drunk" videoSophomore Album Chain Letters Out Now On Saddle Creek  Watch: "Waiting For Some Drunk" via Pure Volume
Los Angeles-based Big Harp just released a video for "Waiting For Some Drunk" from Chain Letters out now on Saddle Creek. The video premiered on  Pure Volume and the band's Stefanie Drootin-Senseney said, "We really love (director) Ginevra Boni's aesthetic. When she approached us about doing a video based on vintage neon, we knew it would would turn out really cool. The visuals are beautiful on their own, and they also really complement our song." Earlier this year, All Music Guide raved about Big Harp's sophomore album saying, "Chain Letters is an evolutionary step. Idiosyncratic, revelatory, raucous, it's a nasty, beautiful rock & roll baptism in pleasure, both carnal and spiritual" and the band was featured in an episode of NPR's Weekend Edition. On the show the pair discuss balancing parenthood with band life. You can listen to the piece online and order the album at the Saddle Creek online store. Big Harp will head into the studio early next year to record with John Congleton. More details on the new recording will be release shortly. 
Big Harp's sophomore album Chain Letters was recorded at Omaha's ARC studios with engineer Ben Brodin and partly at the band's Los Angeles home. The album was mixed by Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes, M Ward, First Aid Kit). On Chain Letters, the duo of Chris Senseney and Stefanie Drootin-Senseney is joined by their friend John Voris on drums. The album moves away from the rustic, pastoral sound of their debut and towards a truer union of their backgrounds (Chris grew up in Valentine, NE, an isolated cow town of 2,800; Stefanie is a native Angeleno). Built on a foundation of crackling fuzz bass and angular electric guitars and keyboards, the songs on Chain Letters play like a series of character sketches centered around escape and surrender, and the blurred borders where the two become indistinguishable.
Chris and Stefanie (The Good Life, Bright Eyes, She & Him) formed Big Harp in December 2010, after a three-year whirlwind that saw the two meet, have a baby, move halfway across the country, get married, move halfway across the country again, and have another baby. As Chris tells it, "I was playing in a band opening for The Good Life. Stef and I started hanging out, binge-smoking and chain-drinking, and we never stopped. Never stopped hanging out I mean. Within a few months Stef had a gut full of baby, and the bender came to a quick and bloody end." When the dust settled, they holed up in Stefanie's parents' spare bedroom, practiced for a week, and recorded their debut album White Hat, a collection of intimate, low-key folk-rock laced with subtle irony and dark humor that earned them comparisons to songwriters like Nick Cave, Tom Waits and Townes Van Zandt.
From the pained apathy of "You Can't Save 'Em All" to the cracked parade march of "Call Out the Cavalry, Strike Up the Band," Chain Letters finds the band enveloping and exploding their literate songs with fuzzed-out, needle-sharp textures. Chris says, "We really built the songs around Stef's fuzz bass. It was kind of funny -- we were sitting around in a bedroom playing really loud with no drums, just kind of trusting that it was going to make sense once we put it all together. Hopefully we landed closer to mid-'70's Iggy Pop than Leonard Cohen this time. Really I'd like it to sound like Leonard Cohen fronting The Pixies. It doesn't though. Maybe a little. You tell us."
For more info, please visit:
http://bigharp.com/http://saddle-creek.com/