Tony Jay

***Solo bedroom-pop project of Michael Ramos (Flowertown, April Magazine, Hectorine). Mostly recorded between last Christmas and New Year's during a window of isolation at home, Hey There Flower preserves Tony Jay’s prowess at making beautifully eerie lo-fi pop; like a hazy memory where your favorite Sixties girl-group melody is perpetually slowed down. Without a band to practice with, Tony Jay recorded the music alone, but recruited a slew of friends to remotely record backing vocals: Karina Gill (Cindy), Griffin Jones (Galore), Kati Mashikian (Mister Baby), Alexis Harper (Al Harper), & Hannah Lew (Cold Beat). 
 
"Hey There Flower, the most recent release from the prolific and mysterious Tony Jay delivers real melodies—both lacey with vocal harmonies and dusty with layered guitars—as fans have come to expect. This release also carries forward and elaborates on Tony Jay's tradition of songs that express a kind of naked honesty about things we all know—love and loneliness and all that—while communicating at the same time a wry edge of skepticism, so that the songs are like coins spinning on edge before landing heads, tails, or lost under the couch. Tony Jay brings us into a nostalgia where we recognize moods from music of the past—Marc Boland definitely comes to mind, as well as Velvet Underground of the Nico era, and Tony Jay even covers Francoise Hardy on this collection—but the songs create a three dimensional space with what feels like a thousand layers so that instead of being thrown back in time, it's like stepping into a little world with its own laws of nature, of which the listener gets just a few hints."—Karina Gill, Cindy/Flowertown