The first time Sammy Tunis saw Michael O'Neill, he was singing R. Kelly's "I'm a Flirt" with a live karaoke band at Otto's Shrunken Head, a tiki bar in the East Village. He didn't even look at the lyrics once, and she fell in love at first sight. About six years later they fell in love for real and moved to Portland, Maine for the summer of 2013. They combined their musical backgrounds (Tunis, of the experimental folk band, The Lisps, and O'Neill, of JD Samson and MEN/The Ladybug Transistor) as well as their love of '90s alternative rock and R&B, and along with their friend Kyle Forester (Crystal Stilts/The Ladybug Transistor), ended up writing a collection of mostly down-tempo ethereal break-up songs, probably about 3-5 years unconsciously in the making.

 

A series of serendipitous encounters led them to a house on Mount Desert Island for a month, where they were able to finish writing, and recorded a demo in an old barn over- looking the ocean. Pretty Marsh, the last of what they consider a narrative trilogy (along with their first two EPs, Somes Sound and South Second) speaks to a forgotten need for closure and a reckoning with the past. In chronological order, Pretty Marsh follows the end of a long- term relationship through the beginning of a new one, examining both the romantic and stark reality of artistic collaboration, financial anxiety and the hopeful yet terrifying unknown of the future.

 

Pretty Marsh is produced by Michael O'Neill, Jordan Lieb (Black Light Smoke) Alexis Gideon (Video Musics) and Gary Olson (The Ladybug Transistor) and is out September 30th. (self-released). 

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