One Ring Zero makes lit a hit

Brooklyn duo creates music around words from notable scribes

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Jul 20, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

If you ever wondered whether serious authors can write pop songs, the band One Ring Zero has an answer. The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based duo’s new CD-hardback book combo, “As Smart as We Are,” shows off their music and the words of 17 relatively well-known authors.

“I was very unspecific in what I was looking for; I just thought it would be fun to ask writers who I liked,” says the group’s Michael Hearst, explaining how some sent poems, and some sent prose that needed work. Names range from Paul Auster (“New York Trilogy”) and Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) to the ubiquitous Rick Moody. Throw in a couple of Jonathans (Ames, Lethem) and you have a bag as mixed as any teen memoirist’s metaphors.

“Jonathan Ames, who is not a poet and is not much of a music connoisseur, gave us a short story, essentially,” Hearst says. Ames suggested reading it over their music.

“That was one of the rules, we didn’t want to go back to the Beatnik era.” In the end they took an Ames anecdote, popular at his readings, about loser kids bonding, and used that.

“We asked him to put in at least one rhyme,” Hearst says, laughing. The result is “The Story of the Hairy Call.” It’s pretty zany.

Which is the way the duo’s music tends. One Ring Zero never met an oddball instrument it didn’t like, such as claviola or Theremin, and the duo’s sound has been described as “19th-century, gypsy-klezmer circus-flea-cartoon-music.”

“I’ve never really been into traditional songwriting,” says Hearst, 31, who works with Joshua Camp, 33. Their taste is for the twisted worlds of Tom Waits and Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. (Contributor Daniel Handler, who wrote the Lemony Snicket series, is sometimes in the band.)

This worked out well with Paul Auster, who is friends with Waits and Jim Jarmusch. “He wanted it to be a blues song, but I heard it as this crooked, six-eight waltz thing,” Hearst says. “The next song he gave us was an anti-Bush song, which is a free download on www.topplebush.com.”

In fact, Auster and Moody went bonkers for working with One Ring Zero, sending them more and more stuff. Auster wrote a whole CD’s worth of songs for his 16-year-old daughter, and Moody has a bunch of tracks sitting in their 6-foot basement.

Marquee value

Landing the names was half the fun and most of the work. So how did 65-year-old Canadian Margaret Atwood end up rubbing shoulders with the Brooklyn brat pack?

“I told Jonathan Lethem (“Motherless Brooklyn”) we needed more women, and he knows her, so I wrote to her.” Atwood’s witty ditty about a Frankenstein monster who wants a mate reads like it was written in one sitting, but at least it rhymes.

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