After 10-years of career-building, 2020 was supposed to be the year Adam Weiner and his band, Low Cut Connie, enjoyed the culmination of a decade of hard work, raucous performances and emotionally direct songwriting, expressing the innermost feelings of “losers and loners and outcasts who live their lives beyond the spotlight,” as Weiner describes them. Low Cut Connie had toured tirelessly in its first decade, playing close to 200 shows per year while releasing five albums and garnering praise from outlets like The New York Times, NPR’s Fresh Air and the NY Daily News. At the same time, Elton John and Barrack Obama declared themselves fans of the band, while Low Cut Connie showed up on Rolling Stone’s Best of the Decade list. The close of the decade found Weiner – after some personnel changes and “a psychological breakdown” where he felt like he “lost six-months of his life” – preparing the release of an epic 2-disc set, entitled Private Lives, with an extensive tour set to kick off with the album’s springtime release. And then COVID-19 happened.
Just as he continued touring, writing and recording while the band was in upheaval and he was suffering a breakdown, Weiner wasn’t going let a pandemic stop him. Locked down at home in South Philadelphia with a tour schedule that included SXSW, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Europe evaporating, Weiner still wanted – no, needed – to keep performing. So as states began issuing stay-at-home orders, he became one of the first artists to stream shows from home, making them as much of a wild party as Low Cut Connie shows, dubbing the webcasts Tough Cookies. Since the spontaneous start on March 12, Weiner has expanded Tough Cookies to two one-hour performances twice weekly that are drawing tens of thousands of views, making Weiner a legitimate internet star, setting the stage for Private Lives’ release, now scheduled for October.
When Private Lives finally hits the streets in the Fall, Low Cut Connie will be unleashing a stellar release that defies categorization. While the songs stylistically range between rowdy guitar rock and plaintive piano ballads, the lyrics are consistently concise, intelligent and revealing, speaking directly for the protagonist and to the listener, all delivered with a raw honesty shared through Weiner’s powerful, diverse and spot-on vocals.
“I’m obsessed with understanding people’s interior lives,” says Weiner. “In order to explore that idea, I had to create a flow that went in and out of these characters’ private spheres. There had to be a push and pull between their external and internal worlds. I knew if I was going to pull that off, I was going to have a big album.”
And “big” it is. The first single, the title track “Private Lives,” went to radio just over a month ago and is already climbing the chart and getting big airplay from many of Triple A’s tastemakers. A trajectory that will continue to grow, especially once this emotional, edgy and authentic album is released into the world.
