Baby Bro Goes for Broke, Takes Bank

Drew Connery, a.k.a. my brother, is a performing fool. After hunkering down in relative isolation for years -- years during which our family quietly wondered what the hell he was up to and I was forming an avant-garde opera ensemble -- Drew emerged from his cocoon this past weekend with a couple single tracks that are so good I almost cried. The studio execs over at 89.4 in Omaha ("The River") must have wept, because Drew's hit single, "Omaha," went straight into regular radio play yesterday, skipping the usual months-long vetting process.

In spite of their name, there's nothing avant about Drew's group ("Random"), unless you count the fact that in addition to singing like a lark, he can also rip out high-pitched melismatic vocal lines as good as the best Hindustani classical singer. And he can rap. Drew specializes in what an old teacher of mine, Daron Hagen, calls doing cliché well. Hagen used to say that the problem with 99.9% of composing artists is that in trying to be wildly creative and different, they lean too far in that direction and end up composing stuff most people wouldn't give 5 seconds of their time to. The creative genius is the person who creates art within the boundaries of the known. Drew's talent is to absorb the essence of a musical genre, its unmistakable imprint (in this case, Third Eye Blind, with hints of Led Zeppelin and Eddie Vedder [Drew, by the way, can I have my CDs back?]) and then churn out perfect facsimiles of the songs these guys ought to have written. Maybe he's spent the last several years creeping into the bedrooms of famous rockstars and writing down the stuff they say in their sleep.

In any case, I'm proud as hell, Drew. Listen to RANDOM on MySpace.