Exclusive: Watch a Live Performance of Jimmy Montague’s “Only One For Me” That’s Built to Last
The song is guitar-pop on steroids, pulled straight from the kinetic tracklist of Tomorrow's Coffee.
Photos by Gustav Hein
In February, James Palko—bassist in the NYC band Taking Meds—dropped his third album as Jimmy Montague, Tomorrow’s Coffee. The record is a blanket of cool that takes Billy Joel progenies and marries them with jazz fusion, yacht rock, power-pop and bedroom lo-fi in really bountiful ways. Palko is one of Elephant 6’s brighten modern-day disciples, and Tomorrow’s Coffee is relentless in its own pursuit of stringing together 10 sticky tracks of the like. Good luck finding a crack in an album like that. We sure couldn’t which is why we named it the 53rd best album of 2024.
Recently Palko assembled a squad of players—Adam Szulczewski (drums), Connor Waage (guitar), Dylan Debiase (bass), Andrew Dominello (keys), Mike and Matt Schmidt (tenor and alto sax), Ben Barnett (trombone) and Jess Hall and Natalia Ice (vocals)—to perform live cuts from Tomorrow’s Coffee at Two Worlds in Queens. And, as you might expect, the results are just as glorious and magnetic as the studio material. Palko says of the session:
“Scheduling musicians into the studio individually to record for an album can be frustrating, and getting a live ensemble together to go out on the road for very little money can be a nightmare, so I figured why not mix the two for a very stress free and low stakes experience of cutting songs live in one day on film. Thankfully I have a roster of exceptional musicians to pull from, many of whom played on the record itself. Live sessions have always been one of my favorite ways to watch acts I follow, more so than live shows or music videos. I’ve always been a fan of seeing this sort of hybrid Behind-The-Scenes yet still vulnerable tightrope act; hearing the band in a clearer environment than a venue yet more real and potentially human than the studio record. Doing them has allowed me to present songs from my record in a way that feels exciting, yet true to quality, as getting out and touring with such a large ensemble isn’t easy.”
Watch Jimmy Montague perform “Only One For Me” live at Two Worlds below.
Read our review of Tomorrow’s Coffee here.