The Bad Penny (beta)

Cassorla – an indie-rock band with jazz and soul tendencies – should probably be named “Cassor-pa-ny-la”: They call Los Angeles home these days but were born in North Philadelphia, and dwelled for a spell in Bed-Stuy and Brooklyn in between.

Now firmly grounded in Eagle Rock, the trio – which consists of guitarist/vocalist Ben Cassorla, keyboardist Ross Garren and drummer Brian Carmody – are counting down the days till the November 9 release of their second full-length, Stay Stay Go, to be made available through Engine Studios. It’s the follow-up to their Songs of Hair, Trees, Portraits, Shouts and Alphabets EP, which dropped August 18.

In anticipation of the new release, Cassorla recently played an Aquarium Drunkard-sponsored gig and have another one pegged for Thursday at Echo Curio with Slang Chickens (start time: 9 p.m.; price: $5).

And if you’re still doubting Cassorla’s radness, check this out: They’ve picked the Bad Penny as the place to exclusively premiere one of their Songs EP tracks, “My Tree,” for download in the blog-o-verse. To boot, Ben also took the time to participate in our ongoing “Cover Me” series – feast your eyes on that feature right here.

Without further ado, here’s the song:

“My Tree”

And here are a few things Ben told the Bad Penny about the track:

“When I was growing up in Philly, we used to invent stories about a squirrel named ‘Sammy the Squirrel’ … i.e. and then Sammy had to move to Paris because his mom had to get a life-saving operation there, and while Sammy was in Paris, he met the most beautiful squirrel in the world named ‘Samantha the Squirrel.’ (I just made that up, but it was along those lines).

“So I decided to write a song about that squirrel. ‘My Tree’ talks about Sammy meeting a girl who doubts he’s got enough food stored in his tree to last them through winter, and he’s got to tell her, ‘You don’t know what I’ve got stored in my tree, something inconsequential I guarantee.’

“Every other song on the EP just features guitars, keyboards and drums, but for this one, we went dirtier. We brought in Priya Swaminathan on accordion, and our keyboard player, Ross Garren, plays harmonica – he’s such an incredible harp player that we had to get him to play on a song.”

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Go here for Cassorla’s contribution to the Bad Penny’s “Cover Me” series.

This entry was posted on 09/18/2010 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Exclusives, Features, Interviews, MP3s with tags Cassorla. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.