Beirut comes back to Santa Fe a little older and a lot wiser.
Beirut, a bedroom music project-cum-full-fledged band led by 20-year-old Santa Fean Zach Condon, has recently earned praise from Rolling Stone, NPR, the Village Voice, the Washington Post and perennially popular indie webzine Pitchfork. Bloggers and hipsters have
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been piling praise on the kid for the past few months, amounting to a fervor that all but screams Next Big Thing status.
Ask a local if they know about Beirut, however, and you'll likely hear a comment about an oft-troubled Middle Eastern metropolis. Ask who Zach Condon is, and you may just get a blank stare.
"There's a running joke in my family that I was in Rolling Stone before I was in any local paper," Condon says modestly, chatting on the phone from a truck stop in upstate New York. He and his band-a shifting lineup currently comprised of fellow New Mexicans Nick Petree, Paul Collins, Perrin Cloutier and Jason Poranski (plus non-natives Jon Natchez, Kristin Ferebee and Kelly Pratt)-are midway through a tour that's taken them from the Pacific Northwest to Europe to his current home (New York) and, finally, to his former home of Santa Fe. This week's shows at the College of Santa Fe and Albuquerque's Launchpad are a homecoming of sorts for Condon.
Indeed, his has been a circuitous and atypical route for a young singer-songwriter. For starters, there's Beirut's music, a wailing, brassy concoction that is part Eastern European gypsy music, part indie pop (Condon is an avowed fan of Magnetic Fields) and part junk music. In other words, nothing that even approaches mainstream viability.
There is also Condon himself, whose soaring, operatic voice jockeys for attention with the brass, strings and ukuleles that haunt Beirut's sound. This is most evident on the band's debut album,
Gulag Orkestar
, the result of years of bedroom recording, which has recently generated a glut of Internet hype.
That hype is how Condon ended up at that middle-of-nowhere truck stop, where he is presently hanging out. Fueled by online praise of
Gulag Orkestar
and a chance meeting with
Albuquerquean Jeremy Barnes, formerly of Neutral Milk Hotel (a group to whom Beirut is often compared), Condon found a way out of his small-town Southwest life.
"I was doing karaoke to sheet music," Condon says of Beirut's beginnings. Specifically, he was playing trumpet to prerecorded tracks, solo, at the Launchpad. He shared a bill with Barnes, now of fellow Eastern European-influenced indie group A Hawk and a Hacksaw, and was soon introduced to Ben Goldberg, the president of New York record label Ba Da Bing!. Condon was offered a recording contract, dropped out of classes at UNM and moved to Brooklyn. This all happened over the past year.
He put together a band. Their first New York show-at the fabled Knitting Factory, no less-was packed and, by all accounts, a disaster. Bad acoustics, bad instruments, shaky nerves;
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the blame could be shared by these or other factors. They should get some credit for trying, though. Considering the pressure, just about any band would have wilted, if not packed up their gear and skipped the gig entirely.
Condon (and the bloggers who chronicle his progress) feels that Beirut's live shows have improved. His band has swelled from a four-piece ensemble to 10 members, and his shows-which include a stint playing to a raving audience in Moscow-have gotten much better.
This from a kid who was virtually unknown in his own town and who scarcely had the resources to make any of this whirlwind success happen on his own.
"It's hard to wrap my head around it," Condon says. "I did everything in my power to get out [of Santa Fe]…it's a small town and it has its inherent problems. I feel like I'm knocking it, but that's not the point."
The point is that he fell in love with Old World music, but found no outlets for that love anywhere within the 505 area code. He did escape once before, after dropping out of high school and saving up enough money to live in Europe. "I was sleeping under a bridge in Paris for a while, then I couch-surfed," he says plaintively, adding that-in addition to embracing the supreme bohemian lifestyle-he also learned more about gypsy music than he ever could in Santa Fe.
Condon, who admits to being tired of folks talking about his age, does come across as being older than he is. On
Gulag Orkestar
, Condon sounds like a man in control of his environment. In conversation, he speaks calmly and straightforwardly, without the insecurity of most kids who've just passed the 20-year mark.
One question, however, does give him pause: what to expect when he returns to Santa Fe for his first show since embarking on this bizarre, fantastical odyssey.
"Obviously we don't wanna be homecoming kings," Condon says, a little hesitantly. "It's more like, we're playing for our friends in New Mexico. The excitement is building up…I have no idea if it'll be madness or just 20 of our friends."
