The Giant Peach is an indie-art rock band from Middlebury VT. Their music captures a bitter-sweetness wrestled into songs late at night. United from disparate backgrounds in folk, blues, and jazz, the members of The Giant Peach came together to render these tales of stubborn love, mistakes, and repeated carelessness with a cutting honesty and an unexpected joy. Their debut record, Pulling Teeth, is due out on 4/21.
Pulling Teeth came about as easily as the title might imply. These songs were written over the course of a tumultuous and ultimately terminal romance, captured moments of the un-tempered excitement of first love – and its eventual loss. In a soft-spoken earnestness that cuts through swelling horn lines and crackling guitars, Pulling Teeth tells of the inevitable loss of innocence that accompanies lost love.
"It's a collection of songs that I wrote over the course of my first relationship and at its end," explains songwriter and frontman Harrison Wood Hsiang. "There's a lot of doubt in these songs -- questioning your past wants and actions, questioning your beliefs as your overturn them one by one by letting people down and being let down, and ultimately questioning the kind of person that you are."
"My best friend Max Shashoua and I came together to give these songs a final form. You know the gist of this already -- we recorded the whole thing in my dorm room with an SM57, a fact we're proud of, especially given how often people praise the quality of the recording these days. Maybe a fun story; we actually recorded the whole thing twice. The first time it just wasn't working. Max and I were still figuring out the details of the arrangements and the shape of the record as a whole, and as that became clearer we realized that we needed to do it properly and do it over again. So over the course of a weekend, we re-recorded the entire record (save "Coats," which we tracked live at Meadowlark Studios)."
"My longtime songwriting hero, Jasper Sloan Yip, lends his vocals to the first track, "Want." He and I connected after I covered one of his songs and he's acted as a real friend and mentor to me ever since. The first show Max and I played together, pre-Peach, was acting as Jasper's back-up band.
