KILL HENRY SUGAR
From
New York City
Members
Erik Della Penna
Dean Sharenow
Writers
Erik Della Penna
Dean Sharenow
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Bio
Dean Sharenow met Erik Della Penna sometime around the early- to mid-‘90s, when both men were making the rounds in New York City’s thriving Irish ethnic music scene.
Fueled by a wave of Irish immigration to the city and its environs in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Sharenow and Della Penna would play pubs and venues like The Black Rose in the Bronx with musicians like fiddler Eileen Ivers and bassist Trevor Hutchinson. There was a high demand for authentic Irish music – this is “before all the River Dance bullshit,” Della Penna noted – and each musician typically could get paid as much as $100 a gig. And, there, among the proletariat, the newly arrived immigrants, they were awarded for good performances with tears, and learned and refined their craft.
Around 1994 or 1995, the pair reconnected when they auditioned for spots as the live back-up band to pop-rock artist Joan Osborne. The tour was a success and the two, who shared rooms, felt a connection. One or both later would back Tiny Tim, Natalie Merchant and folk icon Joan Baez, among others. “Our interests were not just parallel,” Sharenow said. “It’s like finding your artistic partner.”
In 1999, Sharenow recorded a collection of Della Penna’s songs and they released it as the first Kill Henry Sugar LP. Though the group initially focused on a meatier, full, alt-rock sound, Sharenow and Della Penna said musicians who played with them tired of their eccentricities.
By late 2001, they officially solidified as a duo. Over the span of the next nine years, Kill Henry Sugar would release four riveting and sometimes-brilliant records, each featuring stripped-down and stirring songs that mixed the folk tradition of storytelling with early blues and rock n’ roll and a kind of Old World charm whose roots are difficult to map. The songs are distinctly New York songs, but New York is only sometimes mentioned. The duo likes to promote itself on its Web site by saying it lays bare the naked roots of Gotham. “Exquisite compositions, stunningly performed without a net,” Baez told the band.
“You really can hear an evolution but an evolution toward simplicity,” Sharenow said. “As time has gone on, we have found that we don’t need to wrap it up any more …. It doesn’t need the artifice of production. It doesn’t need multi-tracking. It doesn’t need overdubs.”
Sometimes, Kill Henry Sugar can sound like the inheritor of the Mississippi Delta Blues, a folk-blues band scattering its notes and hooks and frighteningly memorable melodies like unpolished gems at the floor near your feet. At other times, they sound like a post-rock act covering Johnny Cash; all the emotion and swagger is still there but the notes are stripped bare, each fragile and set in perfect place.
–Justin Verlucci
Fueled by a wave of Irish immigration to the city and its environs in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Sharenow and Della Penna would play pubs and venues like The Black Rose in the Bronx with musicians like fiddler Eileen Ivers and bassist Trevor Hutchinson. There was a high demand for authentic Irish music – this is “before all the River Dance bullshit,” Della Penna noted – and each musician typically could get paid as much as $100 a gig. And, there, among the proletariat, the newly arrived immigrants, they were awarded for good performances with tears, and learned and refined their craft.
Around 1994 or 1995, the pair reconnected when they auditioned for spots as the live back-up band to pop-rock artist Joan Osborne. The tour was a success and the two, who shared rooms, felt a connection. One or both later would back Tiny Tim, Natalie Merchant and folk icon Joan Baez, among others. “Our interests were not just parallel,” Sharenow said. “It’s like finding your artistic partner.”
In 1999, Sharenow recorded a collection of Della Penna’s songs and they released it as the first Kill Henry Sugar LP. Though the group initially focused on a meatier, full, alt-rock sound, Sharenow and Della Penna said musicians who played with them tired of their eccentricities.
By late 2001, they officially solidified as a duo. Over the span of the next nine years, Kill Henry Sugar would release four riveting and sometimes-brilliant records, each featuring stripped-down and stirring songs that mixed the folk tradition of storytelling with early blues and rock n’ roll and a kind of Old World charm whose roots are difficult to map. The songs are distinctly New York songs, but New York is only sometimes mentioned. The duo likes to promote itself on its Web site by saying it lays bare the naked roots of Gotham. “Exquisite compositions, stunningly performed without a net,” Baez told the band.
“You really can hear an evolution but an evolution toward simplicity,” Sharenow said. “As time has gone on, we have found that we don’t need to wrap it up any more …. It doesn’t need the artifice of production. It doesn’t need multi-tracking. It doesn’t need overdubs.”
Sometimes, Kill Henry Sugar can sound like the inheritor of the Mississippi Delta Blues, a folk-blues band scattering its notes and hooks and frighteningly memorable melodies like unpolished gems at the floor near your feet. At other times, they sound like a post-rock act covering Johnny Cash; all the emotion and swagger is still there but the notes are stripped bare, each fragile and set in perfect place.
–Justin Verlucci
[ view all 56 tracks ]
56 Tracks Found
Genres: Americana, Folk
Moods: Dramatic, Light, Sad
Genres: Americana, Folk
Moods: Contemplative, Dramatic, Warm
Genres: Americana, Antique-Garde, Folk
Moods: Dramatic, Relaxed
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