Eric Sommer
Eric Sommer lives the life many dream of but are afraid to pursue. As a former member of The Atomics, Sommer played regular gigs in his former Boston home. Nowadays he spends most of his time traveling as a solo singer-songwriter, seldom spending two consecutive days in the same town. His ever-expanding life experience provide so much creative fuel that Sommer finds himself working on multiple projects at once in order to document it.
Currently, in addition to perpetual touring, Sommer is completing a full-length album, a book of prose and a portfolio of movie scores. Never far from a pen, he explains the inspiration for his work comes from his surroundings. As those surroundings constantly change as he moves, so do his styles and media. Sommer has spent so much time on the road performing, he no longer maintains a permanent residence.
“It’s a full-time job,” says Sommer of his live shows. “Now I look at my calendar and the thing is full of show dates, but I love what I do and am not really clear on what ‘time off’ really is or what that concept is about. ... The truth is, a few months ago I got home to a house I shared with my friend in Silver Spring, Maryland, and I realized I’d been home for four days in the past three months. (I) gave up the house immediately, and now I live at the Chevy Motel and couch surf when possible, just living from show to show. I do have a new residence in a beer cooler in Johnson City for the moment.”
In addition to the power pop music that comprised his sets with The Atomics, Sommer plays a wide spectrum of technically impressive, guitar-centric tunes that incorporate a great deal of improvisation.
Sommer describes the origins of his stylistic exploration: “At one show a few years ago, the room was pretty full, and I knew where I was in the set list, but it didn’t seem right, so I just started doing a bit of an improv piece using the stuff I like — feedback, overtones, harmonic resonances, pure harmonics and note seeps, and I have been doing it ever since. Some of them go on for a while; some are shorter in the Bartok approach, but they try to be encompassing, interesting in the audio sense and challenging in the intellectual sense. And I do these on the cheapest guitars you can imagine, too.”
Sommer has overflowed the parameters of music into literature. Having released a collection of short stories, poems and prose titled “Red Chairs” (now in its fourth printing), he aims to release a follow-up, this time more autobiographical in nature, called “Black Pancake” in September. While these literary offerings have proven to be hot sellers, Sommer offers much of the same content and more for free on his website (www.ericsommer.com) in hopes that the poems and musings might inspire others.
“About 15 years ago the flood gates opened and I am writing at least one something every day — a lyric, a title, a song, a bit of prose,” recalls Sommer. “Now I am inspired by and about everything from a pencil on the desk to a dead bird on the path. Everything seems to be a metaphor for everything else. There are so many ideas screaming to be heard that I take the loudest one every day to address, but there is always another one right behind it.”
Sunday night Sommer will perform at Pilot Light with other acts to be announced. Music is scheduled to start at 10 p.m., and the door charge is $5.
n HARVEY WALSH-BANGER: The Royal Bangs join Walsh in performing a Pilot Light benefit concert tonight at 10 p.m. Admission is $5, and the show will be followed by DJ sets.
n CANNON FODDER: Badger Cannon and American Plague take the stage at Patrick Sullivan’s Saturday night. The show is slated for 9 p.m. and costs $7 for legal drinkers and $10 for ages 18-20.
Prolific songwriter Eric Sommer finds inspiration in his surroundings. “Everything seems to be a metaphor for everything else,” he says.
© 2011, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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