VIDEO PREMIERE: Eszter Balint Pens Love Song to New York with Cool Rocker “The First Day”

Photo credit: Peter Yesley

Singer/songwriter/violinist/actress extraordinaire Eszter Balint is releasing her long-overdue fourth album, I Hate Memory! via streaming services on November 18th on Red Herring Records. The album was recorded by Andy Taub at Brooklyn Recording with additional recordings by Kato Hideki and Bryce Goggin at Trout Recording, produced by Balint and Kato.

I Hate Memory! is a set of songs tracing Eszter’s journey from communist Hungary to ’70s-80s NYC by way of her parents’ radical theater group and winding its way through a Lower Manhattan mofongo of glamour, poverty, sex, drugs, darkness and yes, light. The songs were co-written by Balint and Stew (Stew & The Negro Problem, Passing Strange) and the lyrics dig fearlessly into oppression, freedom, the possibilities in chaos, the dreams and lost dreams of America, and the battles with memory when you are most invested in the now. These songs became the basis for an “anti-musical,” a theatrical production with songs based on an original concept by her and Stew. The anti-musical is being developed via an ongoing series of shows staged at Manhattan’s famed Joe’s Pub. Balint says I Hate Memory! is an impressionistic travelogue with appearances by Family, Film, Fame, Immigration, Joy, Theater, Shame, Dance Floors, Open Doors, Papaya Ice Cream and The Shah of Iran’s Wife. (Note: the Shah of Iran’s wife is a crucial part of the live show but this spoken word piece did not fit the arc of the album.)

I Hate Memory! is the result and it is Balint’s most ambitious project to date. It is an album, a story, a song cycle, a show, and a collection of poignant vignettes depicting a very special time and place. It is also an account of a teenagehood, albeit a fairly unusual one. It’s the place where Eszter meets and makes friends with her teenage self, perhaps for the first time, through song. 

Today Glide is excited to premiere the video for “The First Day,” one of the standout tracks on the new album. With a visual that incorporates grainy footage of New York City, the song begins with a simple strum of a guitar accompanying Eszter’s cool vocals before morphing into an airy rocker. The song gradually builds energy as Eszter and her band layer in harmonies sliced by dreamy guitar work to make for a song that balances indie rock and pop to make for a compelling listen.

Eszter describes the inspiration behind the song:

The First Day is a love song to New York. It also may as well just be a long song, period. Like all love songs, it is full of possibility, hope, freshness, promise and delusion. But within the delusion, there is a grain of absolutely transcendent truth.

I’m reflecting my father’s joy in the song, as we’re walking the streets and taking in all the newness and wonder of New York City in the late 70’s. In many ways the song is also about the connection between my father and I in that moment.

It’s one of the few happy songs I’ve ever written, albeit not without a hint of premonition about the ephemeral, fleeting nature of a crush. (In this case a crush on a city, a new world, America.)

The chorus was just a placeholder for me at first. We were creating the song in real time, with Stew playing guitar and me riffing on words that came to my mind. I blurted out that chorus. and repeated it, and if it weren’t for him laughing and saying “that’s great!” I may very well have scrapped it. So thanks, Stew!

I like the juxtaposition of this crumbling city presenting as a fairy tale. And it was.

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