New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Northern California band Loverman has released their debut album, Wings of Desire, today. Loverman play like the house band of a lounge bar in the middle of the Californian desert, performing for a late-night crowd of rockers, femme fatales, and aging poets, while
David Lynch watches from a corner booth. The rock and roll swagger is still there but a sadness seeps in around the edges, as stories unfold under swaying palm trees and neon lights. Buy or stream Wings of Desire here.
Sasha Papadin was born into a life of cinematic romance. His father, the renowned Russian poet and dissident Valentin Papadin, defected from Soviet Russian at the height of the Cold War and escaped to the UK with Sasha's mother, a young English woman who had met him while traveling. Swept from country to country as his parents followed jobs across Europe, the family eventually settled in California. His parents raised seven more children while
Sasha grew to become a songwriter and singer for a number of bands, most notably 1955, who played alongside The
Raveonettes and Blonde Redhead and were stalwarts of the Northern California rock and roll scene.
After his father's sudden death in 2016,
Sasha found himself unable to perform and retreated to the recording studio in the back of his furniture workshop, at a loss for how to continue making music. He found solace in duende-drenched albums by Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Damon Albarn and eventually traded his guitar for a piano and began to write music that explored themes of mortality and love. He and long-time collaborators Jake Studer (guitar) and Kieran Maloney (drums) set about soundtracking the melancholic lyrics of love and loss with toe-tapping musical backdrops, weaving elements of Americana and rockabilly into the mix.
The album title Wings of Desire pays homage to Wim Wenders' 1987 film about an angel who gives up his wings in order to experience life and love as a human but must accept mortality as part of the bargain. Loverman, like the character in the film, embraces life, love, and death in his arms, drinking it all in. The world may be going to hell, everybody eventually dies, but damn it life is beautiful! The debut album Wings of Desire is best enjoyed with a cocktail.
