Short Porch: The origin story of Brooklyn’s best new band
I am one of life’s few remaining eternal optimists, and yet I have long observed the truth that – barring the 0.01% of people who appear on podcasts with titles like The Billionaire’s Secrets – we are governed far more by our mistakes and misgivings than our triumphs. So, when I heard the lyrics to the Short Porch murder ballad ‘Frank’, I wondered, ‘What needs to go wrong in a person’s life to write something like that?’.
Frontman Sean McNulty tells me it all began when he headed up into his parent’s loft. He was ten years old, and instruments in the house were hitherto unknown. So, what on Earth were a few dusty guitars doing stowed away in the corner of the attic?
“My parents tried to hide their hippy nature from us for a long time,” he explains. “Then we found these guitars.” Things took a turn for the weird from then on.
“I remember dragging one down, and my mom just started finger-picking a folk song and singing along. I’m just stood there thinking, ‘What the fuck is happening right now?’ I never even knew she sang, never mind played the guitar. I had never even heard music played in that way,” McNulty adds, still shaken by the memory decades down the line. And as he sat there, a boy aghast, privy to his very own Sibylle Baier reveal, his little world was suddenly expanded towards a more bohemian periphery.
From then on, that guitar never left McNulty’s bedroom, its counterculture past-life lingering in his feted teenage domicile like a totem of possibility forever grounded in the moment that his mother turned out to be a troubadour in domesticated exile and his young head fell off agog. Now, that dogeared acoustic with its strings like barbed wire resides somewhere in his own loft apartment. Like his mother before him, by day, McNulty has a ‘normal’ job, but by night, he dons his ‘FRANK’ medallion and puts on Bushwick’s best live show.
This venture has been a long time coming. “In high school, me and my friends were like, ‘Well, forget college. We’re just going to start a band.’ But then we ended up going to college,” he adds with a casual air that implies, ‘You know how it goes’. But this time, there’s a twist to the familiar. “Then we met back up in our early 30s. We had all been in different projects and stuff, but we figured, ‘How’s about that band?’”
As a result of this unique path, there is a welter of experiential resonance to the band’s work. Two core rudiments of rock ‘n’ roll ring out on The Best of… Short Porch Vol 1: the first is the sense that they’re doing it all for fun, and the second is that this thirst for fun is a hard-earned one. In the comic irreverence of the band’s murder ballads and tales of having to move back in with your parents at an age when their neighbours give snooty ‘so things haven’t gone too well for Sean’ looks, you can hear the fact that McNulty had been doing the “acoustic solo stuff and just getting so sick of it”.
You can tell, somehow, that they’re a group of friends who’ve decided to “bite the bullet on that band thing we’d been putting off” and finally got together for kicks and creative fulfilment. And thanks to hard knocks and B plans, they’re not willing to compromise this time, simply taking things in their stride. They just want to kick out the jams, have some fun, and put on a good show.
Shows like those they had seen by Dead Tooth and Osees before—shows where Sean emerged “dripping with sweat” and dreamed of starting a band with his buddies once again. Now he has started that band, and they’re fucking ace, and it all started in his own house. “I live in a loft-style apartment,” he explains, “And we just practised in here for ages before we got a drummer. I used to just knock on the neighbours and tell them to let us know if we were getting too loud. But every Friday, people would just come with little ideas for songs because we write very democratically, and we’d work on them just behind me.”
These tracks are strange, an island of misfit fugitives, all bound by the notion that they have beer on their breath, Meet Me in the Bathroom energy, work in the morning, and a Coen brothers DVD collection somewhere at home. So, they whisked these pieces off to Lyme, Connecticut, where Charlie from the excellent Brazen Youth has a barn old enough to house revolutionary war gravestones, and they tracked them all live to “capture that energy”. Now, that’s spreading the word of Short Porch beyond Brooklyn, which is just as well because, for my money, they’ve delivered the best debut EP since Dry Cleaning.
That’s a refreshing thing for music because they’ve proven that honest sincerity and cutting your teeth in the live circuit is still the way to go. It has made them a band who know themselves. McNulty puts that in his own words when he explains, “Whenever I think of my band, I think of a night out. I think of beers with friends, maybe some bad decisions—those nights that are maybe a little bit grimy, but mainly just good times with friends.”
