Damion - Special Interest |

“After 11 p.m., you stop hearing regular rock on the classic hits radio station and start hearing more strange stuff, one-hit wonders from 1976, or really minor singles from artists I thought I didn’t like because I just hadn’t heard this one weird song before,” says Bloomington, Indiana-based singer-songwriter Damion. Rather than let those offbeat classics fade into the twilight on his late-night drives, Damion returned home and went straight to the Tascam cassette machine. Inspired by both the sound and the bleary-eyed ambiguity, the result of that late-night recording is the bronzy Special Interest, a record bathed in memory and the antigravity of ‘70s AM radio. Once he had finished demoing songs at home, Damion brought the nine tracks that would make up the album to his preferred studio, Russian Recording, and worked with Ben Lumsdaine and Lewis Rogers to polish them up. Aesthetically, Damion aimed to fit within the limits of the era that inspired the songs. “Recording to cassette tape, you either have to play the part right or learn to love the way it sounds wrong, so even in the studio we abided by those same limitations,” he says. Rather than limitations, the structures and styles of vintage rock perfectly suit the album’s lithe falsetto, eerily familiar melodies, and hazy storytelling--the listener immersed in a soup of poetic fragments, Damion himself always at a beguiling arm’s length. On lead single and opener “Company Man”, resonant acoustic guitar and Super Ball bass provide a platform for Damion’s knowing ability to split the difference between confident swagger and laid-back charm. The singer-songwriter pulls joy out of musical echos and lyrical wordplay, in part coming from his love of classic songwriters and long history as a performer. “I am mostly inspired by singer-songwriters like Carole King, Todd Rundgren, etc