13th Floor New Song Of The Day: Low Cut Connie – Help Me

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What? You don’t know about Low Cut Connie?? We didn’t either…but apparently Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama are fans!

With a new album on the way, Low Cut Connie (aka Adam Weiner) has just released this, his new song Help Me and we can’t help but like it. So, fill your eyes and eyes with the video and check out the record company blurb below:

With 5 life-affirming albums released to date, endorsements from Barack Obama, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John and Nick Hornby, a regular stream of accolades in Rolling Stone including a spot on their Top 100 Albums of the Decade list and more, Philadelphia’s Low Cut Connie remain America’s best kept musical secret. That’s about to change; with their foot off the gas because of the touring shutdown, they’ve decided it’s time to see what the rest of the world might think of them, as they prepare for the October 13 release of their new album Private Lives.

Or should we say ‘he’? Low Cut Connie is the creation of singer-songwriter-pianist Adam Weiner. Fiercely independent and DIY, Weiner releases his music on his own label, Contender Records, produces his own records, directs his own videos, produces his own records and these days hosts the band’s own live-streamed web show Tough Cookies.

The proverbial hardest working man in show biz, Weiner started out played piano in New York City, in gay bars, karaoke bars and restaurants (even ballet classes!), often under the name Ladyfingers. He formed the band with two early collaborators in 2010. Its name has nothing to do with tight, knitted tops worn by Australia’s sharpies in the ‘70s; it comes from a character that Weiner created after meeting a waitress in a diner in New Jersey. “Connie had a kind of a rough life. She had a lot of stress in her life, a lot of family issues,” Weiner told NPR. “This is sort of a fantasy of a diner waitress that, on the weekends, no matter what’s going on in her life, she just puts on her tight outfit and her dancing shoes, and she goes and has a good time and has a smile for everybody. That’s sort of a metaphor for our band.”

Low Cut Connie’s Adam Weiner is a man who NPR in the US has described as “masterfully fluent in the foundational languages of Western pop, living at the crossroads where the church house meets the roadhouse, or where the Dew Drop Inn meets CBGB”. (Note: the Dew Drop Inn was “New Orleans’ swankiest nightclub” in the ’40s and ’50s and their place where countless R&B greats, most famously Little Richard, all cut their teeth.) The figurative crossroads are common in descriptions of his music; the song “Boozophilia” – oddly enough Obama’s favourite – was described by Rolling Stone as “like Jerry Lee Lewis if he’d had his first religious experience at a Replacements show”.

The jittery “Help Me” is a plea for understanding at a time when compassion is running in short supply. Like much of the album, it’s an ode to the odd and the eccentric, to the alienated and the broken, and a daily search for liberation.


Marty Duda
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