Gothic Theatre
Busted Hearts
Busted Hearts have filtered out the novelties about town dances and clucky old hens but retained the ones about disappointments and death. New Times Phoenix 2003
Cute little band. We do okay. We play Sundays. People clap. Everybody goes home. Nobody gets hurt. But it’s really a good opportunity for me to learn the music.” That’s Bruce Connole’s modest take on Busted Hearts, the bluegrass band he formed with Glass Heroes/Beat Angels guitarist Keith Jackson that’s played every Sunday night at Long Wong’s since August 2001.
In these days where music seems like just another form of media saturation, Connole is happy just digging bluegrass, which is, as he puts it, “devoid of all that cult-of-personality horseshit. You know that the guy who’s playing and writing [old bluegrass] tunes isn’t thinking, Man, we’re gonna get on MTV and get our brains fucked.’ These were just regular working guys. Only a few remotely made a living out of playing and it sure as hell wasn’t extravagant by any stretch of the imagination.”
Such explains the lure of bluegrass, or at least Connole’s definition of it. He’s filtered out the novelties about town dances and clucky old hens but retained the ones about disappointments and death—all the while indulging in happy banjo and fiddle. Take “Hooker’s Lament,” in which a lady of the night shrivels like a vampire in the light of day; or “I Don’t Mind,” in which Connole plays a death-row resident pleased as punch that he’ll soon fry in the chair and move on to a world without electricity. “Death occupies a good amount of my imagination,” he revels. “I mean, we’re all gonna die.”
-new times phoenix 2003
