5/18: The Three Lives of New York’s Freelance Whales Check in to San Francisco (An Interview)
Conceivably you could experience all three versions of the Freelance Whales today–the recording, the busking and the staging–in San Francisco.
Their record Weathervanes has been out since April and it’s available on their site, where you can also indulge by downloading their single free. Busking (in their case, “freelance” busking?) in New York subways has allowed them to bare down the sound to acoustics and try out new songs on charmed strangers. They’ll be doing a free live set at Amoeba Records on Haight Street at 7 p.m. Finally, they will stage an opening act (in support of The Shout Out Louds) in full plugged-in splendor with synths, harmoniums, drum kits and waterphones on the gilded stage of the Great American Music Hall at 8:30 p.m.
For Chuck Criss, one of the many multi-instrumentalists in the Freelance Whales, the GAMH show is another homecoming (just two months after their Bottom of the Hill gig). He was raised in San Francisco, attending St. Ignatius Prep in the Sunset before taking his banjo-playing chops to East Coast schools, Great Lakes territories and finally to Queens, New York where the wonder of (irony, O, irony) San Francisco-founded craigslist.com put him in contact with the Freelance Whales.
Here Chuck Criss tells the story himself and talks about long bus rides, cold toes, musical friends, vinyl comebacks and, when pushed, gardening.










