"First you get the money. Then you get the women. Then you get the dogs to guard the money and the women." -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Or Life in the Woods
Baby Talk is comprised of six well-heeled young men–five brothers and an adopted second-cousin, actually–who, after a stretch of bad luck that included bad break-ups with high-profile lovers and bouts of cholera, quit their day jobs in international high-finance and retreated to their family’s WWI-era Zepplin floating off the coast of Monte Carlo. There they poured their heartbreak and personal loss into a batch of finely wrought pop songs. The songs are daydreams of a simpler past when the radio played Fleetwood Mac and Elvis Costello, and your life could change with the mere turn of a dial, back before you knew the toll of adult heartbreak (Hepatitis A).
They grew up in a family still clinging to the shopworn gentility of a Southern gentry class that no longer existed and learned to play the songs of the Confederacy on the Jew’s harp before they were five. When they were grade school age, their increasingly eccentric father invested the last of his ancestors’ once considerable wealth into starting a road show that featured his own peculiar strain of Pentecostalism. “Spiritual Fruit” was televised nightly on cable stations throughout Dixie, and while their father called upon the stagemanship he’d learned during his brief stint as the guitarist for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, the future members of Baby Talk learned to speak in their religion’s snake language and handle tongues. By the time they were teenagers they’d never watched MTV. Or worn denim.
That all changed, however, when they reached college and discovered the decades of music they’d missed, quickly sending each other copies of Big Star, Cheap Trick and the Go-Betweens like mash notes in the math classes they never attended because they were homeschooled. For a brief time they formed a power pop cover band with Steve "Nugs" Patterson, who would go on to form the White Rabbits.
Eventually their educational pursuits won out over their musical ones, and they graduated with finance degrees as legacies from august universities you no doubt have heard of and admire. Upon graduation they analyzed large-cap oil and gas stocks at respected brokerage operations and oversaw hedge funds for international asset management companies. Young and generating the kind of wealth people find intrinsically fascinating, they lived outsized lives full of crystal meth addictions and violently sexual escapades with celebrities such as Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
They lost very little of their net worth in the economic downturn, and thus were they able to join the communal, musically vibrant scene springing up around the White Whipperforth Country Club, a virulently exclusive association in upstate New York. Without the distraction of regular people, unlimited leisure time and the support of America’s richest creative community, Baby Talk is focused on creating the perfect pop song.
They’re getting closer every day.
-Jeremiah Tucker, April, 2009
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we just (mostly) finished our first recordings. Look for super rare limited-edition vinyl to come this summer, because it is coming. oh boy is it ever.
Contact Baby Talk :: babytalkbabytalkbabytalk@gmail.com
Also, wild pix of our recording session/week on Joel's blog :: http://personadondada.com"
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