Damon McMahon 'Mansions' album

Not too long ago, Damon McMahon was in a short-lived New York rock band called Inouk, but before that he was a kid from New England who started writing songs by himself, for himself. After moving to Philadelphia at age 17, he wrote constantly—often four to five songs a week—though he almost never performed live. He played a total of three gigs in four years. His music almost never left his room, and he kept his songs stowed away in a drawer in a plastic bag.

At age 21, Damon moved to New York. Along with his brother Alexander and their friend Ian, he formed Inouk. They released an album called No Danger and played shows with the Double, the Occasion, Modest Mouse, White Magic, the Secret Machines and more. Inouk dissolved after a few years, but in its final and most tumultuous period, Damon decided to record—alone—some of the bedroom songs he never got to play with the band. He tracked 22 songs in the two days before Christmas Eve, almost all of them first or second takes. A year later the band broke up and he was left with the collection of spare recordings that would become Mansions.

Although he sometimes plays gigs with a live band, most of the songs on Mansions are simply Damon’s vocals and guitar. The album is a rock & roll record—intense and grabbing—without a crutch to lean on; a psychedelic record—imaginative and uneasy—with nothing to hide behind. His guitar picking is laid back, but vocally, every syllable is laboriously annunciated and smattered with an unmistakable vibrato. Mansions is a record that is quiet and simple but explosively pained—the sound of inner troubles turned outwards and transformed in the process.

A few words from Damon about a few of the songs:

“Baby Brown Eyes” (track 1)
“A lot of the songs on this record—‘Baby Brown Eyes’ included—are mean-spirited love songs. They’re sung in a loving way, and maybe if you’re not paying attention they sound straightforward. But a lot of the songs have another side to them that is more negative. They are almost all attacks, just hidden quietly. They’re written about specific people and they include very specific jabs. But they are still love songs.”

“Elizabeth Taylor” (track 6)
“I was at my dad’s house reading the New York Times and there was an article about this guy Derek Khan that interested me. He was basically the jewelry (and specifically diamond) liaison between the distributors and the celebrities in the black community—he was kind of like the top queen in that circle. He was really well respected but over time became corrupt and started hoarding diamonds, keeping them for himself and trading them in for incredible amounts of money. Finally he got caught when he claimed he needed diamonds for a celebrity hosting an awards show. Whoever gave him the diamonds watched the show and the celebrity wasn’t even on it, so soon after Khan was prosecuted and sent to jail. There’s a line in the song, “Derek Khan we know you well, you’re our Elizabeth Taylor.” They used to call him the Elizabeth Taylor of the black community. So I basically jotted down phrases and facts from the article and sketched it out into four verses. Everything in the song is taken from the article. Although ultimately I couldn’t care less about Derek Khan, his story was just a convenient vehicle to express what I was feeling at the time.”

“Not A Slave” (track 9)
“Inouk was rehearsing up on 38th and 8th in Manhattan in the wintertime. I had a job that would go really late so we would start rehearsing at around one in the morning and wouldn’t get out until like three or four AM. Often after we finished, I would wander around alone in that neighborhood. The song is about me and it feels like that neighborhood in January. Its another one of those hateful songs—a circling, wandering, negative kind of thing.”

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Damon McMahon - Mansions