"The Best Thing I've Heard All Year"
Adam Schlesinger
FOUNTAIN OF POP

I met Dan Bryk offer a Fountains Of Wayne show in Toronto. It was about 10 degrees outside and he was waiting by our bus on his bicycle. Anyway, he handed me two CDs, the first of which was entitled Dan Bryk: Asshole and the other was an unmarked test CD, his just-completed [unreleased] album Lovers Leap. He said, "You probably don't want to hear any more singer/songwriters but, just in case, I wanted to give you these."

Dan is a pianist and writer who's found a niche somewhere between Randy Newman, the Flaming Lips, and Jonathan Richman. Some of his songs are goofy, others are really dark and haunting. Mark Turmell is about the kid he used to envy when he was a teenager because he could programme an Apple 11 computer better than him; Fingers is about a piano player who turned him on to lots of great music and then tried to unbuckle his belt; BBW is about being ashamed of his weight while he reluctantly heads back to the Taco Bell...