Thomas Patrick Maguire
THOMAS PATRICK MAGUIRE- Like the best American singer-songwriters, Thomas Patrick Maguire tells stories. Influenced equally by melancholy troubadours like Elliott Smith and Nick Drake, and by iconoclastic '90s alternative rock like Sebadoh and Nirvana, he sets his low-key tales of working-class life to deceptively simple stripped-down melodies that haunt the listener long after they've first heard Thomas's music. No wonder New York Newsday has twice lauded him as one of New York's best local artists in its year-end wrap-ups, calling his music "utterly hypnotic." Born and raised in Woodside, Queens, NY, to Irish immigrant parents, he started playing guitar at age 12 and was in a punk band in high school called Double Vison (the second "i" was intentionally left out when the band found out there was already a band called Double Vision). The band played in Williamsburg before it was fashionable, back when Thomas's bandmates were scared they might get mugged and beaten on the way to gigs. After the band broke up, Thomas struggled for five years to get something new going, as most of the other folks in Woodside who played music were trying to sound like Megadeth instead of Sonic Youth. Finally, Thomas created some recordings at the home of friend and fledgling engineer Mike Estrella, and sent a recording of the song "Papertown" (sample lyric: "I live in a paper town/And I wanna burn it down") to Shuteye Records, who included it on their Confectionary Infections compilation. Thomas's sessions with Mike Estrella led eventually to the 5-song Papertown EP, which was then expanded to Thomas's first full-length album, Pissing Streams. With 21 tracks, Pissing Streams includes almost all of the songs Thomas had stored up since the breakup of Double Vison. In the meantime, Thomas had also started going to the weekly open mic at the Sidewalk Cafe in the East Village, noted as the home of the antifolk scene that launched the likes of The Moldy Peaches, Nellie McKay, and Beck. The antifolk aesthetic, of singer-songwriters playing acoustic music with a punk influence, matched Thomas's attitude perfectly. At the Sidewalk, he met Dashan Coram of the band Huggabroomstik, who was also running his own record label, Luv-A-Lot Records. Luv-A-Lot eventually released Thomas's CDs, including his next album, Woodside Lanes. Thanks to the popularity of antifolk music overseas, Thomas has also toured in the UK and in Germany. In 2003, Thurston Moore's Protest Records label selected Thomas's response to the Iraq War, "Why You Gotta Do It Too," for inclusion on their Protest Records Vol. 7 compilation, which also features tracks by Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders of The Fugs. On Christmas in 2007, Thomas released his third and newest album, A Slight Return, featuring collaborations with Jon Sebastian of The Color Wheels. The material returns to a lot of Thomas's favorite subjects -- the boredom and frustration of work is examined in tracks like "Pat Gives Me The Post On Sunday" and "Unemployment Dreams" while the rough side of love is the subject of songs like "Now She's Not Looking Back (Relationship Trigger)" and "Imaginary Trophy." The sound retains Thomas's signature intimacy mixed with the new confidence of someone who has been doing this for a while. Now, Thomas Patrick Maguire is a newlywed. He still works a tiring dayjob, and he is trying to book more frequent shows in the New York area. Thomas Patrick Maguire: The Jonathan Richman of lo-fi folk. Revered locally to the point that he was recently the subject matter of Neil Kelly's "Club Mate Sings the Songs Of Thomas Patrick Maguire" album. I've been enjoying TPM's music for years.-Brook Pridemore
