NYC Band of the Week: My Teenage Stride

Borough: Brooklyn/Greenpoint
Fun Fact: Frontman Jed Smith has harvested several future song titles (like "Murderist Seeks Hand-Me-Down") from his abandoned novel about an opium-tripping copywriter.
Why They're Worth Watching: They really do love the 80s, wrapping even the dreariest lyrics in catchy hooks and dreamy retro beats.
For Fans Of: The Smiths, Crystal Stilts, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Let's take a moment to thank Jed Smith's ex-girlfriend. Were it not for her, Smith would've never entered—then won—a Williamsburg songwriting contest, which led to the formation of My Teenage Stride. The band started with Smith, bassist Michael Hollitscher and drummer Brett Whitmoyer. These days, it's primarily Smith, Whitmoyer and a revolving cast of musicians, including Jenny Logan (bass), Tris McCall (synthesizers, piano), Jeff Ciprioni (guitar, keyboards), Dakkan Abbe (guitar, vocals) and Mat Patalano (bass). My Teenage Stride started turning heads with its third full-length release, last year's short but sweet Ears Like Golden Bats. The songs are poppy but not oppressively so, with witty, edgy lyrics-- and they've garnered more than one comparison to cuts from a John Hughes movie soundtrack.

Still, Smith, a self-described studio rat from Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains, wonders how his label-less band has gained so much exposure. Over plenty of espresso and Pall Mall Lights at a sidewalk cafe in Williamsburg, he tried to work it all out. "I'm not a very good scenester," Smith, 31, said. "Ears Like Golden Bats was everywhere when it came out, but we weren't. I really shouldn't be here." He has a theory on hipsterdom, actually. Smith sees himself as a "level three"—an appreciator of music. (A "level one" is merely aware that a hipster phenomenon exists, and a "level two" is a hipster in only one sub-genre of music, like, say, rockabilly.) Being a "level three," he's not a social climber ("level four") or a hipster so transcendentally cool that he doesn't even need the label ("level five"). For better or worse, Smith now has more of a pass to the Brooklyn Hipster Scene for one simple reason: People like his band.

And there's a reason its sound is so specific to the 80s: Smith doesn't think there was a good record made after 1983. They're too clean, he says, too expensive-sounding. To avoid studio slickness, Teenage Stride does its own recording. "Most bands would be better off recording themselves," he said. "And it's fucking free!" Packed with reverb and melody, most songs are lo-fi and short—title track "Ears Like Golden Bats" is barely two minutes—and suggestive of one of Smith's favorite bands, Guided By Voices. "They'd have a brilliant song that's 40 seconds long," he said. "It's like an art joke."

Lyrically, My Teenage Stride's punchlines suggest the wittiest songwriter of them all: Morrissey. "He's serious, but he knows he's ridiculous," Smith said. That attitude translates into tracks like the accusatory "High School," from Teenage Stride's 2005 release Major, Major, which follows Smith's preferred allegory of the music-scene-as-high-school. It's easy to imagine him picturing a dive bar full of level-four hipsters as he wrote the lyrics, and it's understandably his favorite to perform live. "Every time, I stare at people," he said.

Smith and Whitmoyer do collaborate on songwriting duties, but crafting Ears Like Golden Bats' tracks drew heavily from the "whole universe" of sounds, lyrics and titles in Smith's memory. A songwriter since age 7, he finds inspiration anywhere that "only part of me has to be"—in cars, on subways, while working on cars with his dad. He often leaves himself voicemails with new lyrics, and finished tracks usually sound as they did in his head. Is that, um, normal? "Statistically, I think it's pretty rare," he said. "My brother accuses me of having Asperger's."

Smith is currently putting his prolific tendencies to work with Whitmoyer to finish the next, as-yet-untitled My Teenage Stride album, to follow recent release of Lesser Demons, a digital EP available on eMusic and iTunes. Oh, and about that name: While Smith acknowledges a possible subconscious allusion to his high-school preoccupation, he still isn't so crazy about the band's adolescent moniker. "It came from some pit of hell," he said, laughing. "Yeah, it's memorable—so was cholera."

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