Tom Freund Just another WordPress weblog

Here I am with one of my true heroes in music and dear friend Graham Parker at the premier party for “This Is 40″ where GP makes a triumphant return to the populace with his music and is a witty actor to boot. I join him in a club scene early in the movie playing slide guitar and singing backups on a great song “Local Girls” off off his “Squeezing Out Sparks” album. Pan to 30 years earlier and I was listening to this album non stop on a boom box while playing hand ball on Fire Island, NY. We listened to The Kinks Live record and GP on breaks waiting for the ferry to come in so we could make a few bucks pulling peoples luggage on wagons. http://www.thisis40movie.com/pdfs/This-is-40_Production-Notes.pdf We met for several years later after my first record “North American Long Weekend” came out and BMG put us on a tour bus together on a tour called “Tellin Stories” – my first time in a bus and my first time getting to jam with Graham! We had oodles of fun, the tour was curiously sponsored by Hennessey (so we had enough to drink) and myself, Radney Foster, Jeff Black and GP went in a round on stage every night. We stayed in touch and GP asked me to do some touring opening up as well as playing with him. At one point we did a album of his called “Your Country” in LA together and played on the Craig Kilburn show as a duo. So I salute my friend and master of lyrics and music and I am so glad mr. Judd Apatow decided to grab GP for the theme of the comeback artist in This Is 40 (which by the way is a slamming and truthfully hilarious comedy that could set some couples straight I think), and I am so thankful n turn GP grabbed me for my debut on the silver screen. Here we are jamming in upstate NY last year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGchZZ7AjTg and so we rock on!

Tom Freund and Ben Harper record George Harrison song late night at The machine Shop, I played ukulele and we both sang this familiar tune, for free download link: http://bit.ly/JDjiVx or go here:

“In celebration of The Guitar Collection: George Harrison iPad app featuring Ben playing George’s guitars we are pleased to offer, for 24 hours only, a free download of Ben Harper and Tom Freund performing the George Harrison classic “Here the Comes the Sun” live from the Machine Shop. This link will expire Friday, April 27 at 4pm PDT.”

Download link: http://bit.ly/JDjiVx

iPad app link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guitar-collection-george-harrison/id499105381?mt=8

with interviews from Ben Harper, Brett Dennen and Meiko. (Directed by Peter Harding)

Hi, my peops, I have been rather busy focusing on the official release of this album, scheduled for August 16th and I am getting ready to play some festivals and assorted gigs in Switzerland, France and Italy. I wanted you to see this EPK, kind of a video story behind “The Edge Of Venice.” I had some really great musicians/friends lend their kind words and we had a lot of fun filming the interviews and playing songs in our backyards, beaches and alleys. I am truly blessed to be doing what I am doing with such a collection of troops.

Hugs and Cheers,
Tom

Below is the official Press Release that’s goin’ round:

Singer song-writer Tom Freund is pleased to announce the release of his newest album, The Edge of Venice, on August 16 via Surf Road Records. The album is produced by John Alagia (John Mayer, Jason Mraz, Dave Matthews) and features of some of LA’s finest musicians joining Tom in these 9 new songs. “The Edge Of Venice” comes in the wake of his latest EP “Fit To Screen” whose songs have been featured in this seasons “Parenthood” on NBC; and his latest full length “Collapsible Plans” which was produced by his musical cohort Ben Harper and hosted Jackson Browne as a special guest. The song “Collaspible Plans (Sugar) was seen performed live on “Last Call With Carson Daly” in January of 09.
 
Freund will also be touring in the coming months in support of The Edge of Venice. He will be playing in the US September through October, with tours of Europe and Japan in November. Details on tour dates are to be determined. Freund will also be playing European dates with Ben Harper including the Blue Balls Festival in Switzerland on July 28 and Monte Carlo on August 1st.
 
”I feel that (The Edge) is my most direct album to date,” says Freund. “Direct to the listeners in a sonic sense and transparent to what is going on in my life right now.” The songs cover such topics as endless touring (Lakeshore Drive) and cell phones, or lack thereof (Show Me The Love), relationships (Everything, Lonesome) and even his recent step into parenthood (Daddy’s Song). The nod to Venice comes mostly in the breezy “Wounded Surfer Boy” – about whom Freund shares, “I have seen more than a few in the neighborhood – and the girls that trail after them.” The subtle beauty of “Sweetly Calling My Name” evokes an even further westerly feel with references to Hawaii and a slack key tuning on his guitar with hauntingly beautiful vocal help from LA singer-songwriter friend Meiko. “Firetrucks” is what Freund called the “centerpiece of the record” – written on a moody rainy night in San Francisco when his buddy Brett Dennen gently advised him to “stay in and write!” Freund admits he hasn’t a clue where the album opener “Cruel Cruel World” came from.
 
Freund spent the mid-’90s touring with the indie rock cult faves The Silos and has been releasing solo albums since 1998. The  New York Times once noted on Tom,  ”Every year the mounting landfill of new releases that threatens to bury the working music journalists yields a few unexpected gems, and Tom Freund is one of them.”

I decided to do what I could for the extremely troubling catastrophe that occurred in Japan last month. Here is my version of Zeppelin’s “Thank You” – all proceeds through June to be sent directly to Japan relief efforts (I have many friends over there who have directed me to a very good organization). Updates following soon. Peace, t
Follow This Link: and Thank You!

“If the sun refuse to shine . . .” – This version came about one late night in the making of “Collapsible Plans” – the engineer Danny Kalb and I were waiting for Ben Harper (who produced the album) to return from a meeting and I started to goof around, and of course Danny was rolling. We were all set up for the record, so I added some pump organ immediately after. Glad it’s seeing the light and and I can put it to use as well – for Japan. Hope you enjoy, Cheers T

Little Room Of Mine (Video)

Shot by Tom Freund
Edited by Grant Myers

I wanted to do a video from the new EP “Fit To Screen” – so I chose this song first cause I felt It had a mystical connection to it, and I was in Joshua Tree playing a gig and there was an extraodinary  moon out. Then I had the next day to goof off, so I started shooting with this little shotgun HD camera I bought in Japan last year. The house I was staying at felt like it was on the moon with trippy structures and bathtubs in the sand and glass artifacts sticking out of the ground. (Also, notice my dog Emmylou’s cameo, she is from J Tree and knew the terrain very well).  I contined the shoot in N Ca before a show near The Golden Gate Bridge and I added a little footage from my NYC trip the following week. I origionally wrote the song for a project that the Getty was doing and they asked me to contribute a song to go with the Renaissance artist Zuccaro’s drawings. I performed it at the Getty event with a few other LA songwriters on a really cool evening. TWas an honor. And so enjoy,  t

There’s a really cool movement going on internet wise, it’s music and healing and it’s spreading like wildfire. It all started when the woman’s choral groups of Northern Uganda started singing songs to bring the male soldiers home from a terrible civil war that’s been going on for a long long time. Someone heard this calling and made it their mission as well to bring the soldiers home and aid these women. They started something called the The Voice Project: http://www.voiceproject.org.

The Voice Project people had the choral group perform a Joe Purdy tune in the hope that Joe and then other artists would keep this song torch passing idea going round and round to the US and other countries and their story could be heard and some help could be on it’s way. Light a match for peace!

They asked me to do a song, and I thought about a dear friend of mine Brett Dennen and one of his songs “So Much More” that has meant so much to me over the last couple of years, a real “old soul” type of song from someone 10 years my junior – little (big) punk! Here it is.

Then Brett really dug the concept and he went and did a Citizen Cope song and so on and so on . . . There’s a slew of cool songs on there from Priscilla Ahn to Joseph Arthur to Soko and Andrew Bird, go on check it out and see how some of these viral get-together’s can mean so much for these folks oceans away . . . peace and thanks for listening, t

Jim Marshall, the worlds best music photographer, in my opinion, passed on last week and it is a big loss for everyone concerned. He became a very good friend of mine from our first encounter and I am missing him dearly.

I first put a name to the photographer when Jerry Garcia died and I hung a copy of that picture of Jerry sitting on the ground after a gig with a cardboard box that says, “Dead End,” on my frig in New York City. A few years after I was to make my Debut record “North American Long Weekend” and when it came time to shoot the cover, my producer Marvin Etzioni suggested we call up Marshall.

He had shot such jazz greats as Miles Davis, Ray Charles and Coltrane to such rock and roll’s legends as Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. Not to mention that famous shot of Johnny Cash giving us the finger backstage at Folsom Prison or the one of Janis Joplin in her dressing room clutching a bottle of Southern Comfort. With a few calls from our fearless A&R guy Jason Bernard and music sent to Marshall in advance, we were able to get him for the job.

We scheduled a couple of days in New York to shoot the cover and other album/press shots as well. It was to be quite a memorable experience! Marshall was a hound dog, ready to party and hold court all night, with a teddy bear nature but the bite of a lion. You never knew who was going to show up either.

The night before the first shoot day, we go have a drink in the hotel bar and it’s Cindy Crawford and he’s calling me a “little puppy” for ordering a beer and not a whisky, in front of her! Then telling her to listen to my record while i sit in silence, face in my beer. At the airport, he told me he was really into this song of mine “27,” and that it hit him a certain way because a lot of his most famous subjects, Hendix, Joplin, Morrison all died when they were 27. He asked if he could direct the video for the song, something he had never done, to which i quickly replied, “hell yeah.” Unfortunately, this was never to be as the label, Red Ant, I was on declared bankruptcy 2 weeks after the record came out!

The photo shoot started at my dad’s place in Manhattan, where we got some cool pictures of me with an upright bass and then I jammed a few with my Dad on piano. (Jim would later personally make copies of these for me that I cherish). Then Jim asked were the places in NYC that meant something to me, so we started on Riverside Drive, near where I grew up on the upper West Side of Manhattan and at a subway intersection on 72nd street and Broadway, where we got some great shots. Here is one from that series:

Then it was off to my favorite hang out and watering hole, The Corner Bistro in the West Village. We ordered some of there famous burgers, a couple shots of Powers whiskey (no way was I gonna drink beer in front of him again) and we started to shoot. Within 3 minutes Marshall says I got it, much to the chagrin of myself and the album’s art director Tom Jermann. The photo had natural light coming through the window and me sitting at a wooden bar with a beer in front of me and, of course, he shot it in his classic black and white style with that magical Leica of his. After fending off a huge Marshall fan who could’nt stop talking about the shot he took of Miles Davis in the boxing ring, we scuttled off back to the Paramount hotel where we were all staying and Marshall continued to hold court at the bar, where with his photos hung above us at every turn: John Lee Hooker and John Fogerty, and I’m thinking I’m one lucky son of a bitch!

Jim and I kept in touch, he invited me to all his openings in LA and he even came to a couple of my gigs in San Francisco and LA. He once told my wife Francie, “lets lose this puppy and take off together.” She didn’t do that but did trade one of her self portraits for the Janis photo! He was very true to his word, if he said he was going to send you something he did. I hold two of his classic prints today, that i had asked for, that one of Jerry and the one of a young Bob Dylan kicking a tire down the street in the West Village.

The last time I was to see him was at his 70th birthday party, he sent an invite to us and we flew up to San Francisco. Walking in there he was in all his glory, hanging out with Joan Baez and a flock of famous photographers paying tribute. I am reminded of Jim every day when i look over my piano and see that picture of Bob. How was Jim always there, in the right place at the right time and with such a keen eye? I think it was because, as he said it was all about the music for him, and musicians can feel that, they wanted to be around him. I can certainly vouch for that!

Rest on Jim, or party on, whatever you prefer and know that we love you, Peace, TF

The flip cam is down in SXSW! Check back here for videos/stores and etc. from SXSW. In the meantime, grab yourself a free copy of “Truly Mellow” if you haven’t already:

Debbie Does Music?! Here is an excerpt of  Exurb Magazine’s review of the performance.

Tuesday nights are really not my ideal going out night, but Tuesday’s with Tom Freund at The Stronghold in Venice is tempting enough to get me out. Especially when it’s his new EP release party. Opening acts for Tom included Shane Alexander and Chris Joyner, two amazing singer/songwriters in their own right. But I was there for Tom, my favorite male vocalist, a guy I’ve been following for a couple years now, and who hit the jackpot with his new release, FIT TO SCREEN. Independent singer/songwriters are hard to find, if you are looking at the big box stores. But they are everywhere, when you look local, and you have the patience to find a gem. Tom is one of these treasures. His soulful voice, amazing talent, and group of friends he rocks with makes you feel good. The venue was awesome. The Stronghold, by day sells jeans on Abbot Kinney in Venice, by night, the upstairs loft turns into a listening room for great local performers.

To read the rest – go here.