Thomas Breen Photo
Pedersen and James Wyrtzen.
“Silver rings and Oxford shirts / shoulder bag and patchy skirts / should have known everything would fall through / But a shade of blue above your eye / And a long-lost love up in the sky / for some reason, it was all up to you,” Alec Pedersen sings on “Up to You,” the first song from his recent EP New Haven County, released just last week. The lines begin a cascade of verses that Pedersen delivers in a swinging, rushed cadence, over an urgently strummed guitar, interspersed with bursts of harmonica. It’s soaked in pre-electric Bob Dylan, but it’s written now, in 2020, by Pedersen — who’s a teenager.
Pedersen is a 9th grader at Wilbur Cross High School and ECA, and his familiarity with the counterculture of people old enough to be his grandparents was apparent from a public performance he and fellow student James Wyrzten gave on Election Day a couple weeks ago, when they regaled the polling place at Wilbur Cross with original music as well as a recitation from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl done to a take on Jimi Hendrix’s take on “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The photograph that serves as cover art for New Haven County is likewise a clear nod to a certain day when the Fab Four made their way across a certain crosswalk.
But it’s one thing to know and be able to perform those older works, and another thing to do the work of internalizing the style to write your own material. The songs on New Haven County show that Pedersen has done just that — and in so doing, revealed a sly humor that’s all his own. The EP’s second song, “When I’m On The Job I Miss My Darling,” starts with chords that feel almost anthemic, like the way The Animals did “House of the Rising Sun.” But instead, Pedersen gives us the opening line “It’s difficult conditions in the pool hall,” delivered with just enough of a wink and a nudge to elicit a chuckle. There’s a touch of Tom Waits in that, as there is in the line “my necktie’s half-wrinkled and the other half is drunk.” Tom Waits is a musical student of Dylan; with the recorded legacies of both now decades old, Pedersen gets to be a student of both.
And on “Danny’s Trans-Atlantic-Dreamer’s Blues,” Pedersen shows how he can add to that legacy, by digging where he stands, drawing his material from the town around him. He comes up with some startling connections. “Citadels of New England up on the mountain sing praises of Appalachian love,” he sings in the song’s opening line — a poetic observation of the many connections, historical and present, that New Haven has to the South. What follows is a pleasantly hallucinatory take on the life of a working musician that finds Pedersen’s own voice coming through loud and clear. “Posters of paradise and creeds of disaster, and the band shouts high and blind,” he sings. “Bring me a seltzer and bring me that ribeye that desperate real estate guy left behind.” It’s lines that this, funny and true, that make me wonder how Pedersen already knows what it’s like to have played your 1,000th gig.
Pedersen brings it all together on the title track. Backed up by a saxophone played like it’s offering running commentary on the lyrics, Pedersen sketches a portrait of strip malls, grocery stores and city streets that collapses the past into the present. The song is four minutes long but, cleverly, can be understood as covering a single minute — 3 a.m. to 3:01 a.m. — in the life of New Haven. There are nods to pencils and typewriters, but also tip jars for baristas. Pedersen’s sly humor reappears in full; in talking about the grocery store, he sings “the radio plays the Rat Pack, but it don’t take away from the rat traps in the dairy section / and the tomatoes have been forgotten ‘cause all the strawberries are rotten / and no one wants to have a salad at 3 a.m.”
Charming, funny, and totally heartfelt, New Haven County is a snapshot of a songwriter and musician emerging from his influences and coming into his own. Perhaps — in the New Haven music scene’s own tradition of nurturing young songwriting talent, from Mighty Purple to the Foresters to Quinn Harley — we’ll get a chance to see where Pedersen goes from here live, when stages reopen.
New Haven County is available on SoundCloud.