The Best Album of the Year

Speaking from a Dunkin’ Donuts in Manhattan, Marah singer Dave Bielanko is surly, frank, and self-aware. Now in his mid-30s on an East Coast tour supporting his band’s 10th album, June’s Life is a Problem, Bielanko is over the minor windfalls of write-ups touting his visit.

“There’s a guy I’m supposed to talk to after you from my hometown,” says Bielanko, whose band performs tonight at Rock & Roll Hotel. “I’ve spoken to this man maybe six times in my career. There’s nothing to gain from another fucking comparison to Bruce Springsteen, I’m not doing it.”
Notwithstanding logistical complications like vinyl distributors on the West Coast that botched orders and deadlines, the indie decision was the only way.

“I’m not in the music business,” Bielanko says. “I recognize we’re in a lower-tier and we have to play to people that make it to track eight on the record. We needed to suck it up, deal with hate mail for not pressing CDs, make mistakes…we’re doing this to stay alive.”

It should be noted that Life is a Problem was penned and finished in a rural Pennsylvania farm, buried in Amish country, during the dead of winter. It’s an album made possible by the adorning moment. The intro, for example, is a scratchy recording of Bielanko’s stepfather singing a Luzerne County prison song to goats named Mud and Fury. Bielanko calls it the “meandering tuneup that feels like my life.”