Band
on the Rise: Setting Sun
by
Peter Aaron
If
you want to catch the Hudson Valley’s king of D.I.Y.
rock, you’re going to have to do some driving—either
down the Thruway to New York, where Gary Levitt and his band
Setting Sun play roughly once a month, or through the village
of New Paltz and onto cornfield-lined Libertyville Road. If
you choose the latter, look sharply; it’s easy to miss
the tucked-back 19th-century farmhouse where Levitt lives
with his partner—and the local D.I.Y. queen, naturally—Erica
Quitzow, and where the couple operates their Young Love label
and recording studio. Right now, with the insane schedule
of a deadline-straddling music journalist, Manhattan is out
of the question. So off to New Paltz it is. But why is a house
call the only option—doesn’t Setting Sun do local
shows?
“We
don’t really play out a lot around here,” says
Levitt, who sings and plays guitar, bass, and keyboards in
the band, a studio-birthed project augmented by multi-instrumentalist
Quitzow and a changing cast of drummers. “It’s
weird, we draw way more people in New York. The people who
come to see us in the city are there to base their lives on
art, while most people up here have serious jobs, families,
whatever. So we play more down there more and tour a lot.
But I still think it’s important to play locally whenever
we can.”
Levitt
grew up in Queens, where he was inspired to make music not
by the teeming New York rock scene, but by his acoustic guitarplaying
high school friends. “I just thought it was really cool,
how they wrote their own songs and did their own thing,”
he recalls. Oh, and there was also The Beatles. “They’re
still my absolute favorite band. The way they put something
like ‘I Am The Walrus’ together—just amazing.”
Levitt’s
first foray into the indie scene was as a guitarist in New
Paltz-based punk/noise quintet The Kung-Fu Grip, which he
joined in 1993. The band cut its jagged teeth on the East
Coast circuit, but on the night before a planned national
tour the group’s singer...CONTINUE...
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