Comfort music — that’s the specialty of Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs.
“There’s something nice about songs that are instantly familiar if you’ve heard them or not; there’s a format that’s recognizable to most people who have any knowledge at all of the last 30 or 40 years of music,” Golightly said. “Everybody knows the standard arrangement of things and if you don’t, you can guess it.”
When it comes to music, the singer-songwriter-guitarist is a traditionalist.
“It’s exactly what it says on the can,” she joked. “Making things less complicated is quite good. … Songs don’t really need to be six minutes
long; there’s no benefit to it. Keep things short and sweet.”
Golightly and multi-instrumentalist Lawyer Dave use that recipe to whip up the duo’s fifth release, “Sunday Run Me Over,” which will be released Oct. 9.
Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs will play at 8 p.m. Oct. 13 at Mickey Finn’s Pub. Daniel Wayne and 33 1/3 will open. Tickets are $8 in advance and $10 at the door.
The rootsy rockers serve up three cover songs and nine rollicking originals with dashes of humor on their album.
Dave is featured on lead vocals of the cover of Mac Davis’ 1980 song, “Hard to Be Humble,” which begins with he and Golightly making Facebook posts about how much they hate each other.
“It’s a ridiculous song,” Golightly said during a call from the couple’s farm near Athens, Ga. “It’s one of Dave’s favorite songs; he really likes playing it.” She shared the story behind “This S*** Is Gold.”
“I wrote the lyrics to that one. It was aimed at like KISS , you know, the stuff that happens that’s all about the merchandise and how you go and see a band and you get out of the place by going through the gift shop,” Golightly
said. “It was really tongue and cheek.
“You have bands that have action figures of themselves. The thing that’s funny about that to me is that most of the people who have action figures, they themselves don’t do anything. So they’re action figures of people who don’t do much action. They should make action figures of [Dave and me]; we never stop,” she said and laughed.
In addition to making music, the couple rescues horses — and they have five dogs and eight goats, along with geese and chickens.
“We have to load 400 bales of hay this afternoon,” Golightly said. “There’d be sort of lumberjack days and horse trainer and all these other action [figure] versions of us. … We should be marketing this stuff; people love farm sets.”
People love Golightly’s moniker.
Born in London, the vocalist said she was named after the character in Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”: “I think [my mom] put the book down when she went into labor and that was the first name that came to mind.”
The duo won an Independent Music Award for best Americana album for 2008’s “Dirt Don’t Hurt.”
And the Brit has sung on The White Stripes’ disc “Elephant.”
“[Our music] doesn’t have any cryptic messages in it. You’re not going to find anything massively deep or meaningful in it,” Golightly said. “It’s just music and it’s fun.”
