Falcon: an Original Tribute

[Falcon is the January Jezebel Music NYC Monthly Feature Artist. With openers Worst Case Ontario, Spanish Prisoners, and No Eye Contact, Falcon will headline the January FEATURE SHOW at Union Pool on Thursday, January 29.]

Wikipedia defines a cover song as “a new rendition of a previously recorded, commercially released song.” Not one of the songs Falcon has recorded or performs live was written by a member of the band,* another Falcon song cannot be written, and the band’s repertoire will inevitably one day exhaust. But Falcon is not a cover band.

All of Falcon’s material was written in 1987 by a teenage boy named Jared Falcon.

“I met him in elementary school,” says Neil Rosen, lead singer, guitarist and founding member of Falcon. “We were friends but not super close – Shannon (Ferguson, Falcon guitarist) became better friends with him in junior high.” Jared, Neil and Shannon attended Petaluma Junior High School in Petaluma, CA in the later part of the 80’s. Jared was “a super talented, somewhat eccentric kid,” Rosen says. “Quite popular with lots of different kinds of people.”

From 1987 to 1988, Jared wrote close to a song a day for an entire year, and recorded each one onto a Fisher Price tape recorder. (Sadly, Jared was institutionalized in February 1988, and has since passed away.) Years later, Neil and Shannon found the tapes while helping Jared’s mother clean out a storage space in Petaluma. According to Rosen, “Everyone knew [Jared] made the tapes… we helped him make some – they were not a secret.”

Listening to the recordings, Rosen knew almost instantly that he had something special on his hands. “I originally made a group of demos on my own, Shannon really liked them and helped bring the other musicians in. It really just kind of happened. Our drummer and bass player liked the songs before they knew the story.” Falcon’s current lineup is Neil Rosen on vocals and guitar, Shannon Ferguson on guitar, Christian Bongers on bass and Jason Molina playing drums. Shannon and Jason are members of the NYC band Longwave; Christian is a friend and fan of the band.

Many of the songs originally recorded by Jared are merely sketches; some are not even two minutes long. Although Rosen says, “Songs this good have a life of their own,” the band must be given credit for arranging and breathing new life into these literally-hidden gems. Glimmering, delayed electric guitars and high-pitched, often falsetto vocals careen over solid foundations of steady rock drums and bass. The driving, bouyant bass and crystal guitars on tracks like “Q of T” and “Listen In” give the listener a sweet sample of the decade in which these songs were written, before the melodic, atmospheric verses give way to peaks of upbeat and catchy, overdriven-guitar choruses. All this from dusty tapes of a boy and an acoustic guitar.

“Lyrics are always hard to decipher,” says Rosen. “Liberties are always taken to make the songs work for us.” Falcon’s lyrics are often introspective and observational. Listening to lines such as “People always tell me that I’m wrong, but maybe I’m right” and “You only feel right when you’re alone,” it’s difficult not to imagine that these are reflections of the author’s frustrations and insecurities. It’s clear from the lyrics, “Singing a tune in the late afternoon, until the record stops / Then it’s back to my thoughts,” that for Jared Falcon, like so many great songwriters, music was a wonderful escape.

Falcon has built a solid local fan base in NYC, performed shows in Europe and received positive press from a number of publications, including “Entertainment Weekly.” As of yet, Falcon has only a self-titled EP, released July 2008. The band is currently working on their first full-length, and plan on touring to support the effort. Don’t worry about Falcon running out of material – as Rosen points out, they’ve only recorded 20 songs, which leaves about 300 more to go. The sophomore slump is not a concern for Falcon.

It’s likely that many songwriters have fantasized about having one of their songs recorded by a favorite band. Just as all great stories need good writers and storytellers, without good musicians, great songs are merely ideas. Much more than a band paying tribute to a passed musical friend, Falcon is a collection of music lovers dedicated to sharing the best stuff possible. “We love songs,” Rosen says. “We are always trying to make music that interests us – something we would like to listen to.”

by Dan D’Ippolito

*Falcon wrote four songs for O Great Rosenfeld, a book by Daniel Wallace.