Cityhands by Cityhands

Cityhands was initially just a name I began using for solo acoustic material I first started writing around 2000. It came from an old lyric of mine that went, "I been trying my city hands at these country songs / the Southern fried kids can help me sing along." I always liked the ring of the phrase "city hands" because it sounded like an insult that some Clinton-era, country pop musician might've made about someone like me, which I thought was funny and wore as a badge of honor. I decided that if I ever started an alt-country band or put out a 7" record of my folk-ish solo stuff, I'd use it.

Things didn't quite pan out that way, but I eventually donned the Cityhands moniker after I played enough solo shows to where it just felt weird to see my regular name printed on show flyers along with other bands. Around that same time, my friend Dooger and I started strumming and singing each other's songs together, and I think we were both immediately surprised by how much we liked the sound, the process, and each other's music. We decided to make it a regular thing and adopted the name Cityhands for our duo.

Dooger and I aren't always the easiest people to please, especially when it came to being 'singer-songwriters' who hated most music under that folksy umbrella. So, it felt pretty special to work on tunes that genuinely made us happy and gave us a great excuse to hang out, talk shit, smoke cigs, and work on vocal harmonies that sometimes, somehow, came out just as pretty as we'd hoped for. Over the next couple of years, we played a lot of fun shows together that were mostly local, mostly for the same crew of aging punks & chosen family, and mostly in short-lived houses and defunct venues that now only remain in people's memories - part of the ever-expanding ghostworld that occupies so much space in our collective histories and cartographies of punk.

Before I moved to Seattle in 2006, we decided to record almost everything that Cityhands played together, along with some of our individual tunes as well. All things considered, it sounds pretty decent for being the first album I ever recorded and mixed, particularly since everything was tracked in bedrooms and kitchens with the single Russian mic I owned at the time. More than anything, it captures how we played, how we wrote parts, and how our voices and city hands sounded together at that particular moment in our lives. That collection of songs is what you hear on this album, warts and all.

Years later, after I moved back to Pittsburgh, Dooger and I had the perfect occasion for a Cityhands reunion at his kid Raygun's high school graduation party. We got the chance to play old songs for old friends, and it seemed like everybody knew the words and sang along under the lights in our friends' big backyard. After we finished, everyone crowded around even closer to watch Erik Petersen (Mischief Brew) play an incredible solo set comprised entirely of Raygun's requests, which he drove across the state to play for just a bottle of whiskey. To say it was a magical night is a radical understatement. Indeed, if that's the last time we play a show together as Cityhands, it's a pretty damn good way to go out.

Take care and thanks for listening,
-z

April 27, 2022

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Recorded in Bloomfield and Polish Hill (Pittsburgh, PA) during the spring and summer of 2006. Originally released locally as a limited edition run of crappy burned CD-Rs, each one served with a hand-stapled, half-folded 8.5x11 insert, wrapped inside of a 12" vinyl bag. DIY, baby.

Tracks 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16 by Zack
Tracks 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 13 by Dooger

*Songs 15 and 16 were not on the original Cityhands release and are offered up here as bonus tracks (along with new album artwork).

This album is dedicated to the memories of Daniel Glickman and Erik Petersen.

Living room jams & porch songs from both sides of Pittsburgh’s Skunk Hollow. Written, performed and recorded by former members of Teddy Duchamp’s Army, Voice in the Wire, Barons, Gunspiking, Aus Rotten, and The Frantic Heart of It.