Powell & Thyng

It started the summer before high school. On the 4th of July I found Ben behind the school shuffling around and handed him one of the hundreds of songs I was writing at an hourly rate; I was particularly proud of it. “Sweet Gemini” was a strange sort of love song about a girl who could never know how I felt about her. Ben took it home and recorded a raw version of it on his acoustic guitar. He handed me the cassette and we had our first song.
Ben massed recording equipment, I massed notebooks and pens, but it wasn’t long before we refused to say who was writing lyrics and who was playing the instruments. It was the song, the end product, the culmination of work and inspiration, working together saying, “That doesn’t fit and this could use more heft,” that mattered. All songs have always been and always will be crafted by both Powell and Thyng. I don’t care what genre you put us under. We’ve jammed, jazzed, rocked, salsa-d, been cliché and original, organic and electronic. I’d like to think that we sound, more than anything, like Powell and Thyng.
We take our time in Vermont, listening to the muses in the lake, and eating Chinese food when we can afford it. Along the way we come upon things we can’t avoid, and we write songs about them, but there’s a piece of July in every one of them. If you listen closely, you might just hear it.

-John Powell