According to its author (Johnnie Newman), They Set You Up is a mostly jazz-free answer to Steely Dan's The Royal Scam. If the Eagles' Hotel California and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours had a three-way with Michael Jackson's Off The Wall while watching The Breakfast Club - then They Set You Up would be the resulting bastard lovechild. " In other words, it's perfect for weddings and bar mitzvahs."
Johnnie Newman is a singer, songwriter, rocker and, believe it or not, a one time writer of soap opera. After experimenting with every kind of a variety of musical directions he has settled on a decisively skewed-pop position and a uniquely melodic one at that.
After college, Johnnie had secured a precarious writing contract with the NBC soap opera Days Of Our Lives. With a new but fickle reservoir of spendable cash, Johnnie bought a homemade recording rig and began his songwriting career in earnest, under the clunky moniker Jack Studio. A hundred lo-fi songs followed and Johnnie met a music manager who introduced him to prodigious music producer and unforgiving hedonist Oliver Goldstein, of Ima Robot fame.
Within an hour, Goldstein and Newman were writing songs in a dizzying haze of acute pharmaceutical psychosis. Inspired by a Quixotic fit of grand delusion, they decided to start a band. They called the band Tarzana. DJ Lethal of House of Pain soon joined, but the group dissembled after five shows due to a general lack of courage.
Johnnie, licking his wounds on a summer family vacation - aboard a Mediterranean cruise liner which should have been called the Sycophant of the Seas - managed to find a quiet and rarely-frequented room replete with decades-old board games and a Yamaha grand piano. The room was called Cloud 9. It was here, amidst six cubic tons of banana daiquiris, floating blackjack tables and belly-flop contests, that Johnnie would write the bulk of the songs for his proper debut EP They Set You Up.
http://www.myspace.com/johnnienewman
http://johnnienewmanmusic.com
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