Jonathan Richman

Jonathan Richman ( born May 16, 1951 in Natick, near Boston ) is an American musician. He became known in the 1970s as quite eccentric singer-songwriter and is now regarded as a pioneer of the punk and anti- folk.

Biography

He started as a teenager, writing his own songs and moved to first appearances in his hometown of Boston in 1969 to New York, where he fell into the orbit of The Velvet Underground; his own compositions wanted to give no ear there, however. In 1970 he returned to Boston and formed the band The Modern Lovers. Other members of this formation included the keyboardist Jerry Harrison, who should be a member of the Talking Heads later, and the drummer D. Sharpe and David Robinson, who was successful in the 1980s with the Cars. However, the members of the band changed frequently, Richman was as a singer and songwriter is the only constant. Only in 1975 published the Modern Lovers their first and only album, which was simply titled Modern Lovers. It soon turned out that Richman needed his band only to musical accompaniment, and so the next albums released under the name " Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers ". From 1979, he only appeared as a soloist in appearance.

Richman's early work offers an nigh childish naivety; he sang in Ice Cream Man, as he longs for the arrival of Eisverkäufers; in Abominable Snowman in the Market, he expressed his sympathy towards a yeti, who got lost in a supermarket, and in Buzz, Buzz, Buzz, he sang the bees and the flowers. To the charm of these pieces also Rich Mans contributes awkward acting, often nasal mumbling vocals. In December 1977 he had his only hit with the instrumental Egyptian Reggae; he arrived in the British charts 5th place

After 1979, he took a creative break. In 1983 he released the album Jonathan Sings, whose cover on a live stage shows him shirtless! Dressed only in jeans and a guitar slung over his back. In the 1980s and 1990s, his work was quite moody and eclectic - as he experimented with country and among other tradtitionellen Spanish folk songs. Although it was commercially not very successful, but he was succeeded by a steadily growing cult community. The talk show host Conan O'Brien, it was thanks to them that Richman was widely known back in the 1990s: he left him a few times occur in his mission. 1998 Richman composed the music for the film comedy There's Something About Mary, in which he also appeared in persona: together with his current drummer Tommy Larkins he commented like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, the plot of the film in various overlays.