More Than Lester
Seattle, Washington, United States | SELF
Music
Press
This debut music video will have you wanting “more” of up-and-coming local songsters, More Than Lester. Believe that.” - Seattle Film + Music
The simplicity is what got my attention, along with Gino's great vocals. The lyrics are wonderful. [He] sounds live off the floor, as if he was sitting there in a quiet nightclub on a stool with a mesmerized audience in front of him. I found Gino's emotive vocals very moving and warm at the same time.”
Keith Hannaleck
www.musikreviews.com - Keith Hannaleck
Discography
The Great Equalizer - 2011 Joralemon House
Photos
Bio
A while ago, when Seattle-based singer/songwriter Gino Scarpino found himself without a band or best friend, he took what few practical skills he could muster and got a job on the road. He left on his very first tour, a 13-month international whirlwind, not as an artist but as an assistant sound designer and one of 65 members of a Broadway touring company. Scarpino hid in the shadows of backstage hallways and lost himself in a blistering tour schedule while trying to re-figure out what he probably never knew in the first place. Whiskey-soaked chorus girls, dank basement dressing rooms, health nut “A-listers” and firetrap middle-of-nowhere motels chased with crack-of-dawn bus calls, bleak florescent hallways lined with indistinguishable doors and abusive night managers gave him a taste of “The Life”. Traveling like a rock star not as a rock star.
It wasn't until he arrived in New York that he actually felt inspired again. With more people on his block than in his hometown of Bellingham, WA, Scarpino’s lyrics started to change. The “day gig” was harder and more rewarding, bigger budget and higher risk, a mash of commercial midtown-feel good and one-man SoHo masterworks. His music changed as well; the art, sweat, and blood of six years spent working on and around other people’s sound helped recombine and redefined his own. With a new confidence of experience and humility of candor, More Than Lester was born.
From the Spaghetti Western bossa nova of “Where Have You Been” to the Noir Jazz pet sounds of “The Lower Education” More Than Lester’s debut recording The Great Equalizer features a depth of style rarely seen in a first effort. Meticulously produced, recorded, mixed, and multi-instrumentalized by Indie legend and Alternative Pop mainstay Jon Auer (The Posies, Big Star), the constructivist song forms are pulled straight from the architecture of a fast-paced world blurring by the window of a tour bus.
Complete with love, sex, loneliness and a healthy dose of unforced perspective, More Than Lester’s The Great Equalizer is an extended run relational road show, the flat tire you're glad you got because you'd have never seen that desert sunset otherwise and the chill neighborhood bar that none of the tourists know about.
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