And now for a Tiny Desert Concert.
That’s when we bring local bands into the KJZZ studios to play a couple songs for us and talk a bit about the music.
Today we hear from front-person Dario Miranda of the chamber folk band North Brother Island.
The band’s name comes from the tiny island in New York’s East River that was the site of a horrific shipwreck in the early 1900s, in which more than 1,000 people died. It’s lesser-known stories like this one that inspire Miranda to craft his songs.
DARIO MIRANDA: Here's this island right off of one of the greatest cities in the world, and most people don't know about it. I've never heard about it. I've talked to friends that live in New York who don't even know about it.
So that really became kind of a guide for me, like those are the kind of stories that I want. I want to find those stories that are right there in plain sight. So the stories are these things that happen that when you hear about it, you think ‘I should know about this. I should know this.’ Is this thing that's been right in front of us, or maybe something that happened right in your own neighborhood or in your own backyard.
GOLDSTEIN: Is there a different sort of pressure or responsibility when you are, and this is not to say other bands aren't like this, but you're really a storyteller, and the style of play is very dramatic.
So let me talk about that. Is there a little bit of pressure when it comes to the storytelling aspect of things? And then there is a feeling that, no, this is good. This adds an extra drama to the performance we're giving. In addition to the story itself of the song?
MIRANDA: There really isn't any pressure, because I'll let you know a little secret. If you listen to the songs, I'll set them up with the story. But a lot of times, the lyrics maybe don't tell the story completely. Maybe the lyrics are a little more abstract. Maybe I came at it from the point of view of something that's happening in my life or a friend's life, that's, you know, I try to relate what that big story is that I've chosen to be inspired by.
I try to find what is the thing that I can relate to in that story. So it's often I was talking with a buddy of mine about songwriting, and we were talking about in the songs about relationships, love, we realize that it's you take something small in the big picture, love and relationships, it's kind of small. To us, it's big, but in you know, the scope of the world. So you take something small and you make it big. Your love is a mountain. I will cross an ocean for you.
So I decided that I want to take things that are big, such as disasters, shipwrecks, molasses, floods, things like that, and make them small. So try to find what is the personal element there? What is the what can I break that down to? To find the thing that I can relate to that will get an emotional response out of me and hopefully an emotional response out of the listener.
GOLDSTEIN: So Dario, you're gonna go ahead and play a song for us? Tell us about it.
MIRANDA: Yes, this song is called "Life Boat." The F is silent. It's about a yachting race that happened in the '60s, or one of the contestants entered the race to try to make the prize money. Basically, you're stuck on this boat with what you take with you, and what he took with him was ambition to win, which led him to cheat. So, you know, I found that very intriguing, the idea of being stuck on a boat with that sort of baggage.
(Music)
GOLDSTEIN: Let's talk a bit about the style of music generally. Are you good with the chamber folk categorization of what you guys do?
MIRANDA: Absolutely, that's really something that we kind of applied to ourselves. Most of the members come from a classical background. There's like jazz and classical and more studied musicians, our keyboard player, he's actually a composer and writes string quartets and things like that.
You know, I come from a bit of a folk background in the music that I've played before, music that I'm interested in, I'm interested in a lot of different music, but that it always tends to go back to folk. So yeah, I felt that chamber folk really. We identified with that, because that's where we pull from. When we're looking for inspiration, we'll listen to a lot of classical music, or we'll listen to a lot of folk music, and try to pull from those things.
GOLDSTEIN: I guess if we think about the most famous songs in folk history here in the U.S., a lot of them did take on some real major issues, and that others might take on smaller ones. Do you find inspiration in some of the legendary folk songs as well?
MIRANDA: Absolutely, that was, that was another big part of it. Folk songs, they told stories, and they were often the newspaper headline stories. I guess, in a way, I'm not really writing about newspaper headlines of today. That may put us into another genre of music, if I were to do that, but, yeah, I just found that that was interesting, that that's, you know, maybe that was the way some people got their news, was hearing the songs that their neighbors played about those events.
GOLDSTEIN: OK, Dario, why don't you all take us out on a song?
MIRANDA: This song is called "Henry Box Brown." He was a slave who escaped to freedom by having himself mailed in a box to freedom.
(Music)
If you’re in a band or know of one you’d like to hear on air, send us a note at [email protected].
