Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Arts and Entertainment Pick of the Day: David Olney Album Release at The Building
Posted by Jewly Hight on Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 4:54 AM
David Olney Album Release at The Building
When: 7 p.m. Tue., June 21
Where: The Building, 1008-C Woodland St.
You can find singer-songwriters in Nashville who are better known than David Olney, but you won’t find any who can top him as an all-around entertainer. As many years as he’s been doing this — and, counting back to his ‘70s stint fronting the X-Rays, that’s a long time — he’s still staking out thoroughly original territory and attacking his live performances with punkish abandon and theatricality.
Olney writes about and inhabits anything-but-average characters — most famously, the iceberg that sank the Titanic — and he’s taken to streaming his own wry-humored weekly variety show and posted recitations of classic poetry, also in character. “When I kind of hit on my thing,” he’s said, “making up these characters and singing from their point of view was absolutely liberating. There wasn’t any place I couldn’t go.” Olney — and perhaps only Olney — can pull off a jazzy detective pulp concept EP like his new David Olney Presents Film Noir with panache. To top it all off, he’ll be premiering his video of “These Boots Are Made For Walking.”
