My favorite reissue label Light in the Attic Records have rescued another lost masterpiece from the dustbin of musical history.
This time, it’s Songs from Suicide Bridge, a set of spare, beautiful, and dark-yet-hopeful four-track recordings laid down in the early 1980s by David Kauffman and Eric Caboor.
Kauffman, from Madison, New Jersey, and Caboor, from Burbank, California, met in 1982 playing the coffee houses of Los Angeles…
Every week, the pair met in a converted utility shed in the backyard of Caboor’s childhood home in Burbank to play each other the songs they wrote. They were never a duo in the conventional sense–rather, as Kauffman put it, “two loners who happened to join forces.”
After two frustrating years of trying and failing to catch a break in a music industry that was focused on new wave, pop, AOR–anything but the folk-rock the duo were offering–the pair conceded defeat. One of them suggested, half joking, that they should put all their darkest and least viable works together on one record, if only to spite the industry that had rejected them.
“People would tell us those songs were depressing,” Caboor says, “but it wasn’t depressing to us. In a lot of cases, playing those songs in that little room was one of the only things that made us feel better.”
As with all LITA releases, the vinyl reissue is a gorgeous package. This special 30th anniversary edition of Songs from Suicide Bridge comes as a double LP in a gatefold jacket with liner notes and interview by Sam Sweet, never-before-published photos, and a download card for the digital album.
David Kauffman and Eric Caboor: Songs from Suicide Bridge (LITA, thanks Jess Rotter!)