Band
on the Rise: Setting Sun
by
Peter Aaron
...but, alas, also soon broke
up. So finally in 2002 the couple started Young Love Records and released Holed Up,
which was met with a healthy stack of positive reviews. Levitt
put together a threepiece Setting Sun to tour the Western
U.S. and also did a couple of lengthy solo tours to plug the
disc.
When
it came time for the follow-up, Math & Magic, Levitt called
in producer Richard Chiu. “I thought I’d try something
different and work with someone else,” Levitt says.
“He gave the music much more of a sheen than I would
have, but the songs still come through.” True, Math
& Magic is slightly polished compared to the earlier disc,
but it’s light years away from real mainstream slickness.
And Levitt’s fine pop song-craft still emerges uncompromised.
By
2004, having had their fill of the West Coast, Levitt and
Quitzow (by now writing and recording under her last name)
were back in New Paltz, determined to continue making, releasing,
and promoting music on their own, self-contained terms. They
set up Young Love Studio in a spare room of their house at
first to record themselves but soon began taking on outside
clients like singer-songwriters Pete Laffin, Meryl Joan Lammers,
and Doug Wapner, pop-punk trio Fink, and others. “I
love helping other artists work on their music,” says
Levitt. “If they come in with just bare-bones sketches
of songs on acoustic guitar and want to make them sound bigger,
I can usually come up with ideas that add to the songs but
don’t compete with them.” In addition to running
the board at Young Love, Levitt works as an engineer at Sonart
Studios in Woodstock.
It’s
pretty much impossible to write about the music of Setting
Sun without touching on that of Quitzow. Like the proverbial
yin and yang, the two “bands” feed and complement
each other’s art while remaining very different animals.
“Setting Sun is more of a traditional...CONTINUE...
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