M. West Is Heading in the Right Direction With New EP
“Just plain rock and roll” is how M. West describes the music he plays, although he acknowledges that “punk-pop is the subgenre my work is most often filed under. It says that the music is accessible yet edgy … that’s exactly what I’m aiming for,” he tells Brooklyn Roads.
A Pensive M.West / photo by William A. Loeb
Among his earliest childhood memories is “playing a plastic, toy guitar with rubber band strings and singing ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah’ while walking down East 98th Street in Canarsie,” West tells us. “I was mesmerized by the popular music of the 1960s, glued to the AM radio to hear more Beatles or Supremes.” The early Lennon-McCartney writing style was, he adds, “very much like the Tin Pan Alley music that fed Motown artists. My writing style, word choices and use of language come from that sort of lyric poetry.”
He tells us that his parents and older siblings were always bringing home record albums and exposing him to their various musical tastes. “But outside the home,” he says, “music was everywhere. Brooklyn in the late ’60s was electric with excitement in the radical changes taking place in music, culture and politics. My family left Brooklyn in 1971 but I returned in 1981, and again this town was growing an arts scene of its own, much of it in Park Slope and Downtown, where I lived and worked. I was fortunate to have fallen into the midst of such a creative community.”
An M. West Still Life Allusion / photo by Caren Messing
A desire to connect became a driving force behind his music. “Only through publishing and publicizing my work can I learn if anyone else out there feels what I feel,” he explains. The intermingling of Brooklyn’s diverse cultures and perspectives, he adds, has inspired him and others to “learn and grow in the universal language, music.”
As a musician, M. West’s favorite Brooklyn venue for performing is Rocky Sullivan’s in Red Hook, where he and his band performed to an enthusiastic crowd on June 7, 2019, in support of their second EP, Still Life’s Allusions. (The album includes the upbeat, rocking “All About Love”; “Beautiful People,” a feel-good anthem; the bluesy love-gone-wrong “Last Person”; the literally welcoming “My House”; and “Swimming Upstream,” a spacey bit of philosophy with a psychedelic twist.)
Still Life’s Allusions Album Art
“Rocky Sullivan’s is an intimate setting where a performer really gets to engage with the audience [and] the folks who work there don’t treat the musicians like they’re doing us a favor,” he tells Brooklyn Roads. The club’s “friendly, unassuming” patrons also get high marks from West.
He offers one example why: “The people at the door don’t usually ask the regulars to pay the cover charge [but] I’ve seen people get up from the bar and go to the door person to pay it just because they appreciate having live entertainment. How can you not want to play for an audience like that?”
One message he has for other performers is that if they come to Brooklyn, they’re sure to find “a venue that respects your style of music. You’ll probably have to entice your fans to come at first, but the diversity of clubs here means that you and they will get comfortable pretty quickly and you’ll be able to grow your following.”