"Ray Tarantino put on a show that was worthy of a record deal, the sound was studio ready and the band played like one finely tuned unit" (Buffalo.com)
"Solid songwriting, gleaming production, and intuitive ear for melody that separates a flake with a guitar from a true artist" (Fairfield County Weekly)
"...Incorporating enigmatic, elegiac lyrics to solid beats, Tarantino controls his words with the poise of a confident poet" (Spectrum on-line)
"Ok call me later we'll go for a drink..." (Captain Hook)
"You got it!" (Melissa on behalf of Harley)
A thirteen year old boy blasting Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street sax riff to an audience of at least two hundred cows is possibly the most recusant of all rock and roll clichés. It happened in the very green and British Dorset - it happened in 1989 - and that’s where it all began: “I knew I could connect to the audience, those cows were chasing me every time I walked their fields, but after just a couple of shows and some well-placed tunes I had a few friends I could rely on. I could walk safe. A lot of people are killed every year by raging cattle, it seems strange but its true.”
Those dairy mammals would have been proud to see Ray reach a 2 position within the MySpaceUK “Top Artists Charts”, sign a good deal and set up a good band just to be ready to approach the world again. Again?
Let’s rewind to dig it all.
Ray Tarantino was born in Italy. His Sicilian-diamond-dealer-father (really) and old-school-Tuscan-countess mother were terrified by the hypothesis of seeing their son dodging snapped guitar strings and spiralling drugs on stage, and so Ray kept his secret well treasured and conformed to necessities for as long as he had to.
Year were passing, the fog was rising and fellow teenagers were busy smoking dried banana skins, exploring sex or gambling; some spent days playing bizarre ball games that needed big open spaces and some were heading for an accidentally prosperous future. Ray did all the same – maybe heading for a different kind of prosperity - but took a short path to experience by diving head first into what he felt was the beginning and end of it all: incessantly projecting visions of Dylan recording Blood On The Tracks; constantly searching for Daniel Lanois’ efforts to craft what became the U2 sound and the beauty captured by The Joshua Tree; regularly intertwining melodic phrases into Dire Straits’ strategically pure Brothers In Arms; hazily floating within the omniscient flavour of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here while jibing to the vibe of Curtis Mayfield’s masterpiece There’s No Place Like America Today; and last but not least, intimately daydreaming of the day he could have performed to a predominantly human audience.
The world kept changing and so did Ray. He needed money and so he worked, he was asked to provide a social reason to be world-worthy and so he found it, at one point reaching the status of what he refers to as the socially-platinum package.
Quoting the computer-generated voice that’s hardly audible in the mix of the very last song of Ray’s debut album:
After all, the point is that the limit of the achievable isn’t different from the limit of the conceivable, bearing in mind that a man must evolve when given a chance to.
There are times dedicated to thought, and there are times dedicated to action, and it only takes an instant for things to change.
Day one of the said chance - five o’clock in the morning - a 100mph car crash on the highway seems to set all the priorities straight. The end of the end, or maybe, the beginning: there was no room left for business talk and late night meetings, no more oxygen for the guy wearing a suit.
“Crying out to your entire hemisphere that you are giving up what’s always being known to be your life for something that they regard as the absurd is pretty extreme” - says Ray – “like walking up to your father telling him that from next Monday you’ll have dark hair, dark skin, you’ll stick to Kosher diet and you’ll move to London to live with your gay boyfriend. And that on top of that you’ll change your name from Frederick Hitler to Jeanette Churchill.” But the six-foot-two singer songwriter - with over 180 songs in his pockets - smiles, admitting that his imagination might have gone further than reality, although “there was a major shock anyhow, it was a life-changing decision, and like all major shocks this one brought a lot of pain mixed with doses of joy and relief, and it all gave birth to that song.”
What song?
Recusant is that song, the title track from Ray Tarantino’s debut album (co-produced by Tony Bowers).
The album Recusant contains ten well written songs, crafted in conjunction to the distinctive quality of the Anglo-American singer/songwriter-rock custom. It delivers a complete work that has gifted Ray with a 2 spot in the MySpace top-artist UK charts, a world-wide deal with Sony Music Publishing, a past forty-shows European tour and a current twenty-five-shows East Coast promo tour, more than 300.000 MySpace plays, initial AAA non-commercial airplay and a boosting drive to “write ’till I die.”
“Recusant is not really about the sound. Everyone now is looking for the sound but I can hardly tell the difference between a chorus and a flanger, maybe I don’t really care. I like songs, and so I try to write songs, that’s what the album is about.”
“I knew I was in the right spot here in NY when I went for a drink in a hotel on the west side: at the bar they have these gigantic black and white photographs of cows wearing funky hats. I’m on stage and they’re on stage. But maybe, or really, it isn't just about the cows”
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