Fast Heart Mart recorded its latest album, Cheap and Sunny, in a chicken coop.
"I converted it to a studio," frontman Martin Stamper said. "It had chicken wire on the windows. It's real small, but I like it. I'm hoping to maybe one day build a bigger room out there, but it's good for now."
There will be a CD release party at 8 p.m. Friday at the Albuquerque Press Club. It's free and all-ages, and there will be a vegan potluck.
"It's a quick little two-hour thing," drummer Roblyn Crawford said. "We don't believe in the four-band bill. People get tired. Right after that, when we're done, we're going to go over to Stove to see Man About A Horse's CD-release party - that's our afterparty."
Stamper, with back-up singers Crawford and Tanya F. Nunez on stand-up bass, play sidewalk rock, a term Stamper said he coined. Stamper plays a double-necked monster guitar. They play on the street - sometimes in the Free Speech Zone across from the Frontier - and also in intimate venues.
"The sound comes from the necessity of being able to play on the street anytime and anywhere," he said. "It's got to be loud enough so you can get over the traffic noise. It's an urban phenomenon, sidewalk rock. The Violent Femmes - they're like sidewalk rock, but they don't know it."
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He used to call his backing band the Sidewalkers.
"Bill Monroe, he invented bluegrass, and his backing band were called the Bluegrass Boys," Stamper said. "So, they called them bluegrass because his backing band was called the Bluegrass Boys. Sidewalk rock could be for gypsy types. They're trying to make a little living. To make a living you can't have that many people in your band, because then you have to split it."
The catchy "Cheap and Sunny" is also a song on the album, which he wrote about Albuquerque with a hint of sarcasm. Fast Heart Mart's song are lyrically driven and tongue-in-cheek.
"I was sick of hearing everyone tell me my music is negative," Stamper said. "But it doesn't make sense, because people who hire us say, 'Your music is too negative,' and then they hire a bluegrass band, and it's all about killing and death and breaking up. So I wrote 'Cheap and Sunny.'"
He said good art incorporates a wide range of emotions and flavors.
"Good art has many aspects to it," he said. "If it's just funny, it's going to suck, and if it's just happy, it's going to suck. Perfect example is that movie, Repo Man. That has this really serious side to it, and this science-fiction side, but it's also funny, and it's also sad. It's great. That's what I try to do with all my songs."
Stamper used Fast Heart Mart as a nickname while hiking the Appalachian Trail.
"You can't hike on the Appalachian Trail unless you have a code name," he said. "Well, you can, but you want to take up a nickname because there's a lot of people on there who have a criminal element, and if you don't have a nickname, then they think you're a narc."
Stamper was born with a fast heart rate, which he said has killed some of his relatives.
"I was born with a heart defect that makes my heart race real fast sometimes," he said. "And then it doesn't pump any blood to my brain, and I pass out."
He uses an internal defibrillator, which shocks the heart when it beats too fast. For a while, it would go off randomly, but his doctor fixed it.
"It feels like you got kicked in the chest by a mule - it's great," he said. "It saved my life a few times, but it has also caused me trouble. It, a couple times, has gone off unnecessarily and won't stop, and so for a while I had a panic disorder about it. I didn't know when I was going to get shocked. It was basically like a Vietnam vet, walking around just completely out of it, thinking about how I was going to get shocked any minute."
Crawford met Stamper at his show and later gave him a pep talk at the Frontier, she said.
"I told him his band was really good, and I know because I'm really picky," she said. "I'd given up on the music business when I met him, because I was so disgusted by the whole industry and all the schlock that was coming out of it. I moved to the mountains to be a farmer, and I was out of it for five years. When I saw his band, they made me care again."
She said the recent addition of Nunez's bass complements their sound.
"She uses the bow, and it really brings out that kind of dark moodiness, so that's something different about this record," Crawford said. "It really complements kind of the minimalist acoustic sound."
CD release party
Albuquerque Press Club
515 Central Ave. N.W.
Friday, 8 p.m.
Free
