"Kill A Clown (No, Not Really)"

What began as a silly joke set to music inspired our most recent release as a single.

After the release of our 2010 debut EP, "The Cosmic Adventures of ManBoy," we began work on a full-length LP the following year, but it's been slow to materialize due to day jobs and other real-world concerns.

Among the first songs to be recorded for the LP, due to its simple blues structure, was "Kill A Clown."

I'd written the lyrics solely to amuse my friends. I have no real strong feelings about clowns, pro or con; I was just having fun with the notion that there are people who have an intense dislike and even fear of them. When I shared the lyrics with people, they tended to laugh, and then ask, "What's the music like?" So I threw together this basic arrangement, and then it kind of took on a life of its own.

Because I was self-conscious that the song might be misinterpreted, I added the "No, not really" backing vocals to the arrangement (as well as the song's official title) before testing the song out on live audiences. In my mind, it's cartoon violence. But I feared that someone whose mind is inclined toward actual violence might take it the wrong way, and I'd become a poster boy for the "evils" of rock music. I wanted to make it clear that it's a joke, though I acknowledge that it's not everyone's kind of humor.

While work on our album continued at a snail's pace, we played a few live shows, and the audience response to "Kill A Clown" caught me a bit off guard. After our set, I'd offer our EP up for sale, and people would actually be disappointed, to the point of not buying it, because "the clown song" wasn't on it.

I got sort of the same reaction from Rich Russo, host of the freeform radio show "Anything Anything," when I gave him a copy of "The Cosmic Adventures of ManBoy" after our show last month at Maxwell's in Hoboken. He subsequently sent me an email saying he liked a couple of the songs on the EP, but he wanted to know where "the clown song" was -- whether that was on another release. (We had closed our set at Maxwell's with that song.)

At that point we decided to put out "Kill A Clown" as a single independent of the upcoming LP. Russo responded a few days later by playing the song on two separate installments of "Anything Anything" on 107.1 The Peak (serving New York's Westchester and Rockland counties and Upper New Jersey) and 105.5 WDHA-FM (serving northern, central and western New Jersey). It's also been getting regular airplay on The Penguin, an Internet radio station based in Belmar, NJ.

On Dec. 7, veteran rock critic Mike Greenblatt, who praised "ManBoy" as "Disc of The Week" in  The Aquarian in January, reviewed "Kill A Clown" for the online music magazine, Atlas Jams: "...A delicious slice of power pop ... with chunky guitars and perfecto vocals. ... Complete with kazoo break and gunshot, it’s a visceral blast of goodtimey violence."

The single is available at Amazon MP3, iTunes, CD Baby and a few other online stores. Buy it, okay? :)