Day Laborers & Petty Intellectuals
Seattle, Washington, United States | SELF
Music
Press
Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals' name aptly reflects the tension within their music. There's the spit-shine polished instrumentation, coupled with hyperliterate pastoral storytelling lyrics, that together equally recalls both the Avett Brothers and the Mountain Goats. - The Stranger
Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals' name aptly reflects the tension within their music. There's the spit-shine polished instrumentation, coupled with hyperliterate pastoral storytelling lyrics, that together equally recalls both the Avett Brothers and the Mountain Goats. - The Stranger
If you’re looking for a bit of music tonight that makes your brain tick, venture no further than The Crocodile for Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals. What once started a solo project of Rob Anderson has become a troop of three who play a variety of instruments and sing about growing social and economic issues. Dubbing themselves “apocalypse-folk,” Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals will not only have you tapping your feet to their energetic executions, but also, if you’re game, contemplating your own philosophies. - SSG Music
If you’re looking for a bit of music tonight that makes your brain tick, venture no further than The Crocodile for Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals. What once started a solo project of Rob Anderson has become a troop of three who play a variety of instruments and sing about growing social and economic issues. Dubbing themselves “apocalypse-folk,” Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals will not only have you tapping your feet to their energetic executions, but also, if you’re game, contemplating your own philosophies. - SSG Music
Discography
Still working on that hot first release.
Photos
Bio
Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals is a six-piece folk-apocalypse band from Seattle, WA. Born in a tiny cabin on the shores of Lake Washington as the solo project of songwriter-singer-guitarist Robert Anderson, DL&PI has grown to include piccolo, trumpet, cello/violin, bucket drumming, and six-part harmonies, not to mention heartfelt songs about love, life, and the end of the world. DL&PI has been bringing their cacophonous blend of indie rock, folk, punk, country, and jazz to the barrooms and bedrooms of the Puget Sound since 2012.
The projects name was lifted from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, who wrote of two classes of subversives: the drunken, good-for-nothing day laborer, and the petty bourgeois intellectual, neither of whom seems to make any real contribution to society. For aspiring subversive songwriters such as we, the name embodies the split personality of the young American good-for-nothing: half day laborer, toiling in the fields for little to no pay and drinking away her wages come evening, and half petty intellectual, debating contemporary social and economic issues and theorizing grandly about the coming revolution. You might find fragments of this philosophical grounding in the lyrics of the songs. Or you might prefer to ignore them and just dance.
Reviews and Press:
"...spit-shine polished instrumentation, coupled with hyperliterate pastoral storytelling lyrics, that together equally recalls both the Avett Brothers and the Mountain Goats" -- The Stranger, May 2012
"Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals will not only have you tapping your feet to their energetic executions, but also, if youre game, contemplating your own philosophies." -- SSG Music, August 2012
Band Members
Links
