Daily News Record
January 25, 2007

Feature Article
By MARTIN CIZMAR

BROOKLYN COUNTRY SINGER TO STOP AT LITTLE GRILL

You could say Andy Friedman is a little out of touch.

The gritty alt-country singer-guitarist, who’s playing the Little Grill Saturday — the show starts at 9 p.m. and is free — lives in Brooklyn, the center of today’s rock universe.

Still, he doesn’t name any album recorded in the last 20 years in his all-time top 10 favorite, and he says he knows nothing about which bands are big.

In fact he doesn’t even know when his friends are famous.

Take Sufjan Stevens. Friedman befriended the indie-folk singer way before "Illinois" topped Billboard’s Heatseekers chart and landed on nearly every notable music critic’s list of the best albums of 2005.

When Friedman was looking for a new banjo player for his backing band, The Other Failures, he figured he’d ask Sufjan.

"I went to this party with the intention of asking him to join The Other Failures. I told my friend and she was like, ‘What? He’s not going to want to join your band!’ I had no idea how big he was."

Friedman, who moonlights as a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and has had illustrations printed in Rolling Stone, Esquire and the Los Angeles Times, started his stage career doing spoken-word shows.

It was an odd show: Friedman would show his paintings, drawings, and Polaroid photographs on a slide projector while talking and reading his own folksy poetry.

After a few years booking himself that way, Friedman learned to play guitar. Then, he got rid of the projector.

Now, he’s not much different from any other singer-guitarist: "I sort of re-invented the wheel."

Friedman’s sound is based on the classics, he says: Bruce Springsteen, Merle Haggard, Jackson Browne, Hank Williams.

Although he mostly gravitates to sounds old and Southern, the lyrics to songs like "Guys Like Me Don’t Get Grants" are all about the life of an artist in New York.

"The worst thing I can do for country music is try to be rural," said Friedman. "I’m not rural, I’m from Brooklyn."

And, for the most part, people from rural areas respond to that honesty, Friedman says. He has the hardest time with shows in New England, where "They like their folk music the way Trekkies like their ‘Star Trek.’ "

His best concerts are in the South, something that surprised him on his first slate of shows below the Mason-Dixon line.

"Every time I said something true they’d scream and holler," he said. "When something is genuine, and is born of a true place, it reeks of that smell, and some people like that smell and some people think it stinks."