By Michael Washburn
11/29/2006
Josh Weinstein has faced some momentous choices in his life.
The son of a 1960s folksinger and songwriter and the grandson of a concert cellist, Weinstein’s training in music—both as a writer and a piano player—began at age 10.
After majoring in English in college and paying his way through grad school playing the piano for jazz cocktail soirées, the New Yorker went to work as a writer, editor, and copywriter, continuing his musical life in smoke-filled rooms in the evenings. Imbued with a nomadic streak, he lived in Colorado, California, Washington, D.C., and Maine before moving back to New York City near the end of 1999 and entering the advertising industry.
Why, after winning a six-figure job as an advertising exec, did Weinstein make the leap that many of us dream about but few pull off, quitting his job to devote himself to music 24/7?
Listening to Weinstein’s new album Brooklyn Is Sinking, which appears on the heels of the successful Petty Alchemy, one gets an idea of the spirit that animates him as a singer and songwriter.
Like some of the authors who read at the Brooklyn Book Festival at Borough Hall in September, Weinstein is intrigued with the characters, comic and grotesque, who can make the place haunt the mind of a writer, artist, poet, or musician like a revenant from the tales of the one-time resident of Clinton Street, H.P. Lovecraft.
While the borough may not be sinking in a literal way, it is heavy with the weight of unrealized dreams. Take a look at some of the lyrics from “Is and Should Have Been,” the third track on Brooklyn Is Sinking, which evokes a bar where men while away the hours of their lives in a petty pace, till the last syllable of final call:
“Meet the smallest man in Brooklyn
Thinks he should be famous
Thinks he’s smarter than the room
Little man you must be joking
Run and join the circus
We’ve already seen a hundred like you
Raise your glass up for the losers . . .”
Aware of the gap between what some sad characters—not blessed with choices anything like his—have done and wanted to do with their lives, Weinstein has composed a paean to the state of “living in between,” as he calls it, the condition of the big talkers whose insecurities may lead them to start fights. We’ve all run into a few of those.
Weinstein has also developed the poetry of those who spurn all pretenses. He knows how to evoke a man in the street who is down on his luck, who has a five-dollar bill in his pocket and not much else to his name, and who seeks someone to confide in down at Salchow’s on Eleventh Avenue, though this may not prevent Brooklyn or anyone in it from sinking deeper into a spiritual abyss.
The song “Trouble” is a case in point, a dirge in which Weinstein comes off a bit like Charles Bukowski, minus the in-your-face vulgarity. Despite his success in the world of business, and despite having rubbed shoulders with so many others basking in the glow of money and accomplishment, Weinstein reveals himself as an artist drawn to the hip poetry of people who get their hands dirty and grapple with life in the least glamorous situations.
While trouble may be his subject, Weinstein on occasion shows his gifts as a writer by giving the listener only details from the edges of a situation, as in the title track of Brooklyn Is Sinking. Here is a song that achieves an effect for which Hitchcock is famous, arousing unease without showing violence or its aftermath:
“Put all the bags in the car
Brooklyn is sinking
We’ve been through this already
Around the block and back
Only the curtains are new
Drawn tight and black.”
The listener can piece together what his happening, with one or another degree of success, but the final words convey some of the borough’s ills and desperation more vividly than any scene of violence could do:
“News at 11
Jesu el christo
Take all the hate from my heart
Brooklyn is sinking
Brooklyn is sinking
Brooklyn is sinking.”
Josh Weinstein Lifts a Glass to Fellow ‘Losers’ At the Lyceum
A show marking the release of Josh Weinstein’s new album will take place at 9:30 p.m. on December 9 at the Brooklyn Lyceum, 277 4th Avenue at President Street in Park Slope. Tickets will cost $12 each. For more information, call (718) 866-Gowanus or visit www.brooklynlyceum.com.
