Possibly 4th Street, Episode 15: Falcon (a/k/a Songs Ostensibly from a Passed Classmate)

We hardly ever quote from press releases. Hell, we hardly ever read press releases. No, more often than not (way more often) those one-sheets that come like so much wrapping around CD review copies end up alongside out-of-date clothing catalogs, empty envelopes destined for the paper recycler.

But this caught our attention:

"How many bands form with a finite amount of material? Really, think about it. How many bands form knowing, from the start, what the songs already are, and that there will never be another one?"

Good questions. Intriguing ones.

Falcon, formed and led by northern California transplants Shannon Ferguson and Neil Rosen, is named for their former Petaluma Junior High school classmate Jared Falcon who passed away in 1988 at the age of fourteen.

And, as it turns out, Jared was a multi-instrumental whiz kid (count bass guitar and baritone sax for starters) who wrote songs like other kids play video games. Songs his namesake band, now living in Brooklyn, records and performs.

On the surface, at least, the Falcon story is reminiscent of writer Walker Percy's promotion, at the behest of the author's surviving and rumored-to-be overbearing and overprotective mother, of the deceased John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces (though Toole didn't exactly pass from natural causes). Such was Percy's influence and imprint that the novel was soon published by the Louisiana State University Press, and the following year awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Now we're not suggesting an impending medal for Music here, but, coincidentally or not, upon visiting with the members of Falcon we learned that at least part of their press release might deserve a fiction prize as well.

Possibly 4th Street Number 15 (Part Two) Falcon

Who:

Shannon Ferguson, Neil Rosen, Jason Molina and Christian Bongers of Falcon (with Ferguson and Rosen on lead interview)

When:

Tuesday, July 1

Where:

In front of St. George's Episcopal Church, just off of Stuyvesant Square

Shannon, tell me something you've never ever done.

Shannon: I've never gone skydiving.

Tell me something you've done once and one time only.

Shannon: I rode a freight train.

You rode a freight train?

Neil: He totally did, too.

The name of a book you've read at least twice.

Shannon: Cat's Cradle (by Kurt Vonnegut).

The name of a movie you've seen at least three times.

Shannon: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Do you own a rake?

Shannon: No.

And your favorite Beatle.

Shannon: George.

Neil, who's your favorite Beatle?

Neil: George.

Shannon: George is the only one that didn't do anything stupid.

Neil: All of George's songs are good. He didn't write as many, but they're good. And he was nice.

So you and Neil and Jared attended Petaluma Junior High in Petaluma, California. How did you get to New York?

Shannon: I moved to New York first. I moved, I think, 11 years ago.

Is this on the freight train?

Shannon: No, this is after that.

Neil: You tried to get to New York on the freight train.

And why New York?

Shannon: I wanted to be in a band that was doing something, and I wasn't in a band that was doing anything in California so I thought I could move to New York and meet some people.