My name is Dan Fishback, and this is how I’d like you to see me:
Dan Fishback is a writer/songwriter/singer/guitarist/performer/playwright. With his band, Cheese On Bread , he has toured North America and Europe in support of two full-length albums, on which Fishback is the primary songwriter. As a solo musician, he released in 2005 the full-length album Sweet Chastity, a multi-genre meditation on virginity and fear. His sophomore album, Mammal, an equally ambitious mix of slick radio pop and lo-fi anti-folk, is slated for release in 2008. In the meantime, Fishback has put out the covers EP Strange Little Faggots, played a gazillion folk shows by himself, and occasionally performed as the frontman of, well, The Faggots, a grunge/punk band that doubled as an experiment in queer semiotics. Sometime before Mammal drops, he will release Calendar Boys, a b-sides collection.
Throughout his musical career, Fishback has also written and performed in a string of surreal, comedic political theater pieces, including Please Let Me Love You and Waiting For Barbara.
In 2007, he was awarded the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists to develop and produce his new play, "YOU WILL EXPERIENCE SILENCE" (or The Last Chanukah) , an erotic exploration of citizenship, responsibility and the very concept of history. The Last Chanukah will tentatively run in New York City in December, 2008. The Six Points Fellowship is a partnership of Avoda Arts, JDub Records, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, and is made possible with major funding from UJA-Federation of New York.
Dan Fishback was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up across the border in suburban Maryland. Early on, he learned about his family’s legacy of social protest, from his great-grandfather’s campaign against the Tsar to his grandmother’s labor activism and his father’s work in civil rights. In high school, this iconoclastic ethos translated without nuance into a general queer punk aesthetic and a well-intentioned, if unrefined, distaste for commercialism. In college, Fishback matured politically and became an outspoken leftist voice on the University of Pennsylvania’s otherwise-conservative campus. His weekly columns and other public appearances prompted torrents of angry mail from Christians, Jews and Republicans. His dorm room was vandalized and he lost a few friends. He spent most of his senior year simultaneously protesting the War in Iraq as one of the leaders of Penn For Peace and starting the band Cheese On Bread with fellow student Sara FitzSimmons.
After graduating in 2003, Fishback moved to New York City, where he promptly became a fixture in the East Village’s notorious anti-folk scene. With a home base at the Sidewalk Cafe, the community provided Fishback with the opportunity to develop his songs and theater pieces. Since beginning his performance career at Sidewalk, Fishback has performed in venues all over the city, country and world. In 2006, legendary performance venue P.S. 122 mounted a festival of his projects with No Direction Homo: The Many Identical Personae of Dan Fishback.
Fishback continues to expand the breadth of his work with new projects in film, comic books and teenager-oriented literature, as well as a steady stream of musical and theatrical ventures. His friends are all performers and artists, and as long as they all know each other, they will have calendars packed with collaborative events and endeavors.
This biography was written on October 17th, 2007.
P.S: Fishback continues to play solo shows all over the place, and particularly enjoys COLLEGE GIGS. Bring him to where you’re at: [email protected]
P.S1: The new Cheese On Bread album, "The Search For Colonel Mustard," is available at these fine online retailers:
- Olive Juice Music
- AntiFolk.net
- CD Baby
