ARTIST: Michael Leviton
TITLE: My Favorite Place to Drown
LABEL: Smith Street/Ace Fu
GENRE: Indie
BITRATE: 172kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 35m total
RELEASE DATE: 2006-00-00
RIP DATE: 2006-09-28
Track List
----------
1. Summer's the Worst 3:36
2. You'll Pay for Your Day at 4:26
Pleasure Island
3. The Beach Gets Cold 4:00
4. I'm in Love with the Tip of 3:05
Your Iceberg
5. Saltwater to Quench Your Thirst 3:21
6. Ships Passing in the Night 2:29
7. For Lydia 2:14
8. If Sense Were Really Common 3:21
9. The Glanis Fish 2:50
10. If You Give a Girl the Moon 3:02
11. Common Sense 3:15
Release Notes:
It was Summer of 2001 on Matador Beach in Malibu, California when Michael
Leviton first sat with a ukulele and a pretty girl and performed his ukulele
love songs. The girl was charmed but not successfully wooed. Nevertheless, this
leisurely summer romance blossomed into a magnificent obsession: not with the
girl, but with ukulele love songs.
By the time Michael relocated to New York at the end of the Summer of 2002, he
had composed fifteen nautically-themed ukulele love songs specifically for beach
concerts before audiences of one. Michael's ukulele seductions reached their
climax with his composition "For Lydia". Tragically, Lydia was like the others
before her: charmed but not wooed.
Michael was not discouraged. In fact, his love song productivity doubled, though
his lyrical subject slightly shifted. The songs still glowed with innocence and
longing, but now they also contained themes of heartbreak, alienation, despair.
After numerous rejections with varying degrees of harshness, Michael gave up on
love and concentrated all romantic energy on ukulele songwriting. It was in this
celibate period that he wrote the most bittersweet material on his debut album,
songs like "Saltwater to Quench Your Thirst", "The Beach Gets Cold", and
"Summer's the Worst".
Michael had never intended his songs for large audiences, but once in New York
City he played his ukulele at open mikes, and soon fell in with the Lower East
Side "Anti-Folk" community, a group of singer-songwriters playing acoustic music
but with rebellious, punk sensibilities. At The Sidewalk CafΘ, the headquarters
of the "Anti-Folk" community, Michael befriended many brilliant songwriters,
including Regina Spektor and Nellie McKay. Michael began to play non-beach
ukulele shows open to the public, developing a loyal following.
It was after an opening slot with Regina Spektor on Valentine's Day, 2004 that
girls started winking at him, handing him napkins scribbled with phone numbers.
As the girls became more persistent, so did the fast-talking showbiz folk.
Michael was asked to write and perform a ukulele jingle in a VH1 promo; he came
up with "You're the Vh1 for Me" and, for one summer, Vh1 was the most romantic
of all the music networks.
Over the course of the following months, couples began to infiltrate the crowds
at Michael's shows. Young lovers could be seen awkwardly getting to know each
other, flirting, laughing, kissing; it was like a strange epidemic! Michael
began to receive thankful e-mails and phone-calls from couples that claimed to
have fallen in love at his concerts. Eventually, the situation could no longer
be ignored; Michael wrote a song dedicated to all the happy couples in his
audiences called "You'll Pay for Your Day at Pleasure Island".
Michael signed with Smith Street Records and, in the Spring of 2005, went into
Smith Street Studios with producer Kyle Fischer of Rainer Maria fame to record
his debut album "My Favorite Place to Drown".
"Technically, my favorite place to drown is in a pretty girl's eyes," Michael
says. "But on a less personal level, the title's just supposed to mean that in
romance, you can't play it safe; you've got to get in over your head. In less
cynical days, sailors used to chase after sirens and drown all the time. But it
was worth it; love is the most worthwhile of self-destructive pastimes, don't
you think?"
Michael Leviton grew up in Los Angeles, son of a music writer with a room full
of records. Though Michael had no formal musical training, jazz harmony snuck
its way into his brain. "Maybe it's because I have the same birthday as Richard
Rogers," Michael says. "Or maybe it's all the Looney Tunes I watched as a kid.
Looney Tunes used a lot of barber shop quartet music. That frog sang 'Hello, My
Baby'. Bugs Bunny sang 'I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover'. I used to sing
that song to myself when I was a kid but only the first line because that was
how far Bugs got."