First Listen: Space Captain climbs the “Sycamore”
(August 16, 2017) Your relationship with your parents has reached a certain level when mom and/or dad feels confident enough about your maturity to share stories from their past. Of course, parents often share stories from their misguided youth, but now the stories are not lectures that serve as cautionary tales to scare you straight or modify behavior. Now, pops or mom address you as a trusted confidant – confident that they will neither be judged nor see this moment of intimacy and honesty turned into a weapon.
“Sycamore,” the lead single from the debut album from the Brooklyn based band Space Captain, is a musical story of art imitating life. The airy, funk and synth infused ballad is based on an incident told to lead vocalist Maralisa Simmons-Cook by her father. Her pops recounted a story about a “tumultuous love triangle my dad was thrown into post-college.” The tune’s title refers to the place where the conversation took place – in the rear of a Brooklyn bar called Sycamore.
Space Captain is a band that fuses elements of folk, indie, psych rock, jazz along into their unique brand of funk. Well, all of those genres have been used as platforms for troubadours to tell stories, and Simmons-Cook and her bandmates put their own spin on that tradition. Check it out.
By Howard Dukes
