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“I sang in a million choirs, studied opera forever, and took a lot of music theory in college, but guitar is entirely self-taught,” says Elias Spector-Zabusky (or his alter ego Cold Weather Boy). “I’ve never taken a lesson in it, I’ve never played my scales, I don’t know my positions, so I don’t see guitar in terms of theory. I didn’t write thinking about it. I like harmonies that I experience as angular, that don’t necessarily move quite as you expect them, but one of the things I work on is not complicating things just for the purpose of complicating them. Sometimes things have to stay comfortable and easy.”
A city transplant from the frigid upstate New York, Elias recently finished undergrad and slowly got burned out on pursuing a career in theater. “For the longest time I really thought I was a theater person who did music,” ESZ admits. “But I was frustrated with theater, and when I was working this office job I only had a flexible-ish schedule, and so I wasn’t really going on auditions—for a variety of reasons—but I was able to somedays go home and play guitar for a couple of hours and try to write something.”
This EP comprises five original tracks developed from these original demos. All the songs feature fellow NY-natives Miles Arntzen on drums and Doug Berns on bass, who Elias met the same day that they tracked the EP. Entirely Brooklyn-based, the EP was produced and engineered by Lily Wen at her storefront studio, the Chamber of Commerce, in Ditmas Park and mixed by Eli Crews at Figure 8 in Prospect Heights.
released November 10, 2017
Elias Spector-Zabusky - guitar, vocals, keys
Miles Arntzen - drums
Doug Berns - bass
All tracks composed and arranged by ESZ
Produced and engineered by Lily Wen
Co-produced by ESZ
Recorded at the Chamber of Commerce
Mixed by Eli Crews at Figure 8
Mastered by Jacob Blumberg
© 2017 Figure & Ground
Thanks to Jonny, Hannah, 707, egg bagels, & the S train