There’s no bluster to Dylan Metrano. There’s no overbearing swagger to anything he does. His songs are feebly controlled, allowed to just skitter off into the air like a released balloon, or an escaping soul, reluctantly leaving a body, probably looking over its shoulder countless times to make sure this is really happening. The reflection is not independent of the kind of man the slightly balding tender heart is himself. When he stepped up the staircase at our studio, he pulled everything in close to his vest, refusing to give too much away. He was silently and absently there with Casey Dienel and as the gentleman, allowed her the courtesy of recording first. He packed himself into a side room to the master control room and played his guitar the entire time Casey was recording in the other room, practicing his friends’ songs and remembering how certain songs were arranged on guitar instead of the way they appeared on recordings as piano numbers. He was meticulous in his preparation, exhibiting the utmost care to make sure that everything he was to later do would be up to snuff. He’d intended to have Casey and his drummer Cat play with him for the session, but he didn’t feel that they’d gotten enough practice time in together and therefore called it off, doing it solo and with that slight film of drizzly day to his voice. He hit each of these five songs on the first take and was captain business as far as alacrity went. There was no wasted effort, strictly a skin and bones representation of a batch of songs that could very well be sung by a choir of ghosts. The name of the song isn’t a clever attempt at being abstract and fantastic. There are dimensions to his songs that smack of the kinds of vibrations that can only be explained as measurable hauntings. It’s without strenuous effort or willingness that his music is steeped in rustic lamenting of lost love and love that refuses to fully happen. Metrano does nothing to hide his take on matters of the clumsy (if only for its efficiency in always finding something to get itself messed up in) heart. It’s more than skin deep. It’s a silent flair and it’s all Metrano, all the time.
– Sean Moeller

First song
Singing with Ghosts (Tiger Saw) [1.90MB] [1713 downloads]


—original version appears on Sing!
On the record it’s a piano song, but this is the way it was written. There’s a short guitar solo at the end of the song on the record, too, but in a live setting, our drummer Gregg Porter has been whistling this part, and I’ve come to like it a lot. It’s a song about falling for someone. And what it feels like when you are just starting to feel that.

Second song
Distance (Tiger Saw) [1.74MB] [1603 downloads]


—unreleased
This is a song from our forthcoming album, Tigers on Fire. The album version is a duet with Camille McGregor from the lovely band “Ponies in the Surf” :http://www.poniesinthesurf.com . It’s a pretty simple song about the difficulties of trying to have a long-distance relationship. The most significant line to me, is the end: “I’d stay my whole life, if you asked me to.” I think that everyone just wants to feel like they’re wanted.

Third and fourth songs
Backyard with a View (Tiger Saw) [2.80MB] [1537 downloads]


&
OK (Tiger Saw) [2.76MB] [1477 downloads]


—unreleased
Both these songs are written by my friend Sidney Alexis, and recorded by his band the “Hotel Alexis”: http://www.hotelalexis.com. I was in that band for a while, and played guitar on their first record. Sid is one of my favorite songwriters ever, and I’m really happy to share these songs with people. I know I messed up the words a little bit, but this was the first time I had played these songs! I like to cover my friends’ songs, and usually have one in my set somewhere.

Fifth song
The Tiger and the Tailor (Tiger Saw) [2.53MB] [1431 downloads]


—original version appears on Sing!
Another piano song. We joke that this is the Norah Jones jam on the record. Very adult contemporary. This is a love song, and I really like the couplet, “I promise I will always shine / If you’d be my funny valentine” because of the Chet Baker reference.