Our Little Secret Blog

Watch this space for more details, but I’ll be doing an Our Little Secret stealth set on Saturday, October 1, at 2:30 pm as part of a day-long music and beer festival in the Bethesda, Maryland neighborhood where I live.  It’s part of  a benefit to raise funds to maintain and operate the Bannockburn Community Club. 

With luck, it will be a beautiful fall day.  There will be local brewers on hand offering samples of home-brewed ales, and food, beverages and baked goods will also be available for purchase.

Musically, it’s a non-stop cavalcade of local talent.  I’ll have a little combo that has never played together before, which always adds an exciting element of surprise to the overall merriment. 

The event starts at noon (and goes until 9 pm-ish), and the address is 6314 Bannockburn Drive in Bethesda.

Congratulations and heartfelt thanks to everyone at BandHouse Gigs on the sold-out August 25 tribute show honoring the music of Simon & Garfunkel and Paul Simon at Strathmore Music Center.

It’s a fantastic group of volunteers and musicians who come together for these shows — there’s nothing else like being even a small part of these shows — in the words of Bill Starks, it’s medicine for the soul.

I played two of my favorite Paul Simon tunes (“Red Rubber Ball” and “Hazy Shade of Winter”) with the great David Kitchen and a crack band featuring Karl Straub, Ronnie Newmyer, Chuck Sullivan, Spencer Hoopes and Danny Schwartz (with Alan MacEwan of The Grandsons guesting on trumpet).  I’m hoping that the show eventually gets a CD release, sometime in 2012.

Fun facts learned while researching the music of The Cyrkle: The late Tom Dawes of The Cyrkle wrote the Alka-Seltzer “Plop Plop Fizz Fizz” jingle and the “Our L’Eggs Fit Your Legs” jingle for the hosiery maker.  He also produced a couple of Foghat records.   And a red rubber ball actually does not shine at all. 

Here’s a very cool alternate mix of “Red Rubber Ball” that Columbia Records accidentally let sneak out a few years ago.  It drops the calliope organ and brings the guitars to the front of the mix.

(Photo courtesy of Kenny Reff/Limelight Communications and BandHouse Gigs.)

The BandHouse Gigs tribute show, featuring the music of Paul Simon and Simon & Garfunkel, is SOLD OUT. And as the show poster says, apparently for obscure legal reasons, neither Simon nor Garfunkel are expected to appear. But I will be appearing  . . . and I’m looking forward to playing with a fantastic group of musicians and singers at the Strathmore Music Center on Thursday, August 25.

A very pleasant surprise to see Our Little Secret reviewed in today’s Blurt. Thanks to editor Fred Mills for the kind words. And while you’re there, please read about my brother’s fine new record — P.J. O’Connell’s Join The Crowd.

A new review of Our Little Secret just appeared in the Belgian webzine RootsTime.  If you know Dutch, go to the website and search under the CD reviews section; otherwise, here’s a translation (thanks to reviewer Luc Daelemans (Lisael) and to Rootstime editor Freddy Celis for sending this along to me):  

“Only by first seeing the cover of this record are you prepared to hear it. The CD gatefold features parodies of legendary album covers by Nick Lowe, Tom Petty and Iam Gomm.  So, right off the bat, you’re charmed knowing that this may appeal to your sense of humor, and you’re happy that it so clearly indicates from the outset what to expect of the music.  Add to this that O’Connell refers to a genre that, in my opinion, was the most listenable music of the last century and you get it completely. The British pub rock period, with names like Rockpile, Brinsley Schwarz and Dr. Feelgood, produced some of the best music of the last 70 years.  In the U.S., we think of kindred spirits like Big Star and Tom Petty.

So, who is this man, really?  Edward O’Connell, a fifty-something year-old from Washington, DC, has spent thirty years in the local band scene, mostly in cover bands.  In his youth, he was a DJ and he was the head of a college radio station. For a living, he’s a lawyer – so much for the perception that all lawyers in suits are unreliable philistines.

For this album, he’s assisted by fellow musicians, and on production, they brought in Jared Bartlett, known for his work with Last Train Home.  Edward writes smooth pop songs that are all in the easy-to-follow format of the traditional pop song: catchy chorus, about three minutes in length, a bridge, and a sea of ​​tinkling guitars.

The atmosphere of the album is pure retro Stiff Records – the legendary British label that gave many unseen and unheard artists a chance.

It’s hard to find favorites on the album. All the songs are strong, and all are in the “power pop” genre, as they say in the U.S.  I can hear in some songs the first Elvis Costello album. There’s the “angry young man” in “With The Ring,” a solid rock tune with a nice chorus. But it can also be the soothing, quieter Elvis, as in “Pretty Wasted.”  You could, in my opinion, do much worse working with such an influence.

In other songs, he’s closer to a more current, more mature Nick Lowe. Thus, “Happy Black” would have stood out on any recent Nick Lowe record.  “Cold Dark World” reminds me of Ian Gomm, a greatly underestimated musician. “Your Ride Is Here” is reminiscent of Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.”

You should definitely listen to “I Want To Kiss You”’s singing and sax solo, and decide whether there’s anything that’s not perfect about this song, and listening to “The Hardest Job In The World” will make you realize that there’s far too little of this kind of music on the radio, instead of  just easy-listening music.

Records like this don’t have to be made every week – just release a record like this every so often, and I’ll be happy again for awhile. You’ll also hear that the songs on this album have had time to mature. And despite the explicit references to the sources of inspiration, this is no simple copy job, but a beautiful integration of parts into a new whole.  It’s crafty work, and nothing more needs to be written.”

Thanks to David Wild for including me in the same breath as The Zombies, Richard X. Heyman and Virginia’s Schiavone McGee in his July 1 Huffington Post piece on noteworthy new pop music.  And if you’re a Neil Diamond fan, David’s “He Is . . . I Say” is a must read.

Here is a clip from YouTube of the live performance of “Pretty Wasted” from the Mid-Atlantic Song Contest Gala from January 2011 at Jammin’ Java in Vienna, Virginia.

It’s a one-off band, featuring David Kitchen, Karl Straub, Kennedy Wright and Eric Nelson.  It’s the first and only time we’ve all played together (and we never rehearsed this as a five-piece . . .). 

Thanks to SAW-MASC and Stairway East Video, and to David, Karl, Kennedy and Eric.

UPDATE: Our Little Secret will be featured next Monday evening on the Album Hour on Wisconsin’s WBSD-FM, a great radio station in Burlington, Wisconsin, about halfway between Milwaukee and Rockford, Illinois.

It’s an hour of music and conversation between yours truly and Album Hour host/WBSD General Manager Tom Gilding.

If you’re in the  area, tune in at 89.1 FM — or listen via streaming audio on the Internet here — at 9 pm CDT, 10 pm EDT on Monday, March 21.

Greetings to my friends in the Netherlands, who have discovered Our Little Secret, thanks to the latest issue of Heaven, one of the foremost Dutch music magazines. 

If you aren’t fluent in Dutch, the review said “Our Little Secret proves O’Connell to be an excellent songwriter. He clearly knows his classics and knows exactly how to make an original album in the timeless style of  Jesus of Cool, Damn the Torpedoes and Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True.” 

Thanks especially to Heaven Editor Eric van Domburg Scipio for finding the record.

You were in it. 

And Randy Newman was in it too.