by Frank Grimaldi
Reviewed by Robert Urban
Urban Productions, New York
www.roberturban.com
New York City is a world-class mecca for independent gay singers, musicians & songwriters. They come here from far and wide to find and express their own unique voices.
Of the many gay musical artists I’ve known and worked with over the years here in Manhattan, most possess a style and sound representative of places other than NYC. I’m always fascinated to discover a true, homegrown queer artist with a genuine New York City sound.
Enter NYC-native gay singer/songwriter Frank Grimaldi, who just burst back onto the rock music scene with his second CD, entitled Balance. This is the long awaited and much anticipated follow-up to his 1996 critically acclaimed debut album Walking Backward. In realizing his latest creation, Grimaldi joined forces with veteran record producer Barry Goldstein of Think Big Productions.
Of the many different kinds of openly gay songs on his new CD, Grimaldi says, “I wanted to show a whole person with a vast range of emotions, which is one of the reasons I called it Balance.”
New York City is a world-class mecca for independent gay singers, musicians & songwriters. They come here from far and wide to find and express their own unique voices.
Of the many gay musical artists I’ve known and worked with over the years here in Manhattan, most possess a style and sound representative of places other than NYC. I’m always fascinated to discover a true, homegrown queer artist with a genuine New York City sound.
Enter NYC-native gay singer/songwriter Frank Grimaldi, who just burst back onto the rock music scene with his second CD, entitled Balance. This is the long awaited and much anticipated follow-up to his 1996 critically acclaimed debut album Walking Backward. In realizing his latest creation, Grimaldi joined forces with veteran record producer Barry Goldstein of Think Big Productions.
Of the many different kinds of openly gay songs on his new CD, Grimaldi says, “I wanted to show a whole person with a vast range of emotions, which is one of the reasons I called it Balance.”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York to Italian-American parents, Grimaldi’s music, lyrics and vocal approach are steeped in the style of his own hometown. With songs uniquely evocative of gay life & love in an urban setting, he carries on a writing tradition much beloved by fans of American popular music. This “big city” sound is characterized by a certain gritty, bluesy, resolute mood, and colored with wistful streetwise reminiscences and feelings.
Through a treasure trove of diverse singer/songwriters such as Frank Sinatra, the Garlands, Billy Joel, Lou Reed, Joe Jackson, Harry Warren/Al Durbin, John Kander, Jacques Brel and even the Ramones, this gotham style of song is ever-reinterpreted and kept alive, a testimony to the eternal lure cultural centers like New York City have for us all. They are songs in which quintessential Big Apple backdrops like a busy street-corner, a subway stop, a tenement rooftop, a brownstone stoop, or a dive bar all come to mind as the stage from which the singer delivers his songs.
With his trademark bohemian Lower East Side get-up of Kangol-style cap, sweatshirt, faded jeans, converse sneakers, and sprouting a beatnik soul-patch, Frank Grimaldi looks the NYC beat-poet part. Even the cd’s artwork--complete with real life graffiti, brick apartment buildings and litter-strewn back alleys--speaks of his original stomping grounds.
For the millions of gay men (this writer included) who left their small hometowns for the freedom, safety, and perhaps purposeful anonymity of big city life, Balance's opening track “City Walls" is a particularly poignant anthem. The lyrics weave queer life and city life together in a day-by-day narrative tapestry that’s immediately recognizable to queer urban dwellers everywhere.
The fast pace and rude attitude of stereotypical New Yorkers is aptly captured in the bitchy, rockin’ “Shut-up and Listen.” This song literally flies by in less than two minutes time, yet epitomizes the brashness of citified lovers quarreling.
That certain town-without-pity, lost-in-the-city, ships-that-pass-in-the-night loneliness one can feel in the struggle to find meaningful love in a big, tough town, is expressed simply and beautifully in male-to-male ballads like “The Right Thing,” “One Night Kiss” “Love is Not the Same” “Blueprint” and “The Same Mistake.”
It is the sheer variety of love songs on Balance that make Grimaldi really shine. Each is written in a different rock/pop style, and each is made even more moving by Grimaldi’s own understated way with words and music. He has the ability to deliver lyrics that appear naďve, protected and matter-of-fact on the surface (the typical hardened New Yorker), but reveal an almost unbearable vulnerability and emotional honestly underneath.
Although Grimaldi’s romantic ballads are clearly gay-male identified and same-sex directed, they are so well written, mature and sincere as to have a universal appeal to listeners of any sexual-orientation.
In the cabaret/blues tune “Bad Habits,” we are given cosmopolitan world-weariness in the tradition of classics like J. Kander’s “New York, New York," Billy Joel’s “New York Frame of Mind," and with its gay hustler lyrics, perhaps a naughty touch of Dietrich ala “Black Market” and “Laziest Gal in Town” thrown in: “Cheap talk and cocktails/smoked all my cigarettes/got three loaded ashtrays/and a mountain of regrets."
Grimaldi might sing about regrets, but his fans won't--at least not after picking up a copy of Balance.
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