Brooklyn-born band The Damnwells have released “Pretty As Pittsburgh”, an ode to a city with a special significance to Alex Dezen, the band’s platinum-certified songwriter. “Pretty as Pittsburgh” paints a “vivid portrait of a love interest who is as beautifully complex as the city she’s compared to.”
The song is taken from their upcoming album, Bad at Beautiful, scheduled for release on August 9th, 2024, will be The Damnwells’ first studio album since 2015’s self-titled release. It will feature the original band formed in Brooklyn in 2000, including songwriter and vocalist Dezen, bassist Ted Hudson, guitarist David Chernis, and drummer Steven Terry.
The songs were recorded remotely between November 2022 and June 2023, tracked in various studios across America, and compiled together at Dezen’s home studio in Los Angeles.
Dezen explains about the new single:
“Pittsburgh has always been a special place to me. Maybe because my sister went to college there, and I always loved coming to visit her and hanging out with her cool friends. It was the early 90s, and the underground music scene in Pittsburgh was thriving with eclectic rock bands: loud, guitar-driven angular music that would become the foundation of the aesthetic “indie rock” movement. Her boyfriend Matt, a guitar player I greatly admired, was in a band we all adored. They were on an indie label and toured the country in a van, something I had dreamed of doing with a band of my own one day. My mother was also from Penn Hills, a little suburban enclave east of the city. My father and his family were from the Pittsburgh area as well.
But more than a personal connection, it’s Pittsburgh’s dazzling beauty and history that has always struck me. It’s rivers, intersecting below towering hills of trees and rocky palisades, feels both sacred and violent. Heir to steel magnates like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick, Pittsburgh also heralded the birth of the labor movement, and bread with it a fierce and enduring pride across generations and cultures. And as with any center of industry— both because of and despite of it—a great art movement has also thrived. It’s this kind of simple, straightforward alchemy, like the meeting of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers to form the Ohio, that make me love this city.
I had the title “Pretty as Pittsburgh” in my notebooks for years. I wrote several versions of it before this final one, honing it into shape over twelve years or so, coming back to the idea again and again, often in the back of a van the morning after a show, heading out of town via the Fort Pitt Tunnel. When I started writing songs for the new Damnwells album, Bad at Beautiful, I knew I had to drill down on what I wanted to say about Pittsburgh and how I wanted to say it. I made it a simple love story, a la Tom Petty, because he always knew how to say I love in the most simple ways.”
The album’s first single, “Without A Heart” was released almost a year ago on June 22, 2023 and after the overwhelming response they received from fans, the band launched a Kickstarter campaign to see if there was still interest in a new album from the band. They quickly exceeded their fundraising goal and decided to move forward with a release.
