Birdseed Shirt

Deleted Scenes burst onto the now legendary Olney, Maryland hyphy-pop scene in 1998, after songwriters Dan Scheuerman and Matt Dowling met at a juvenile detention center urinal while visiting incarcerated relatives. Citing Cabaret Voltaire, Sparks, and Misissippi John Hurt among the artists in which they were in no way influenced, the two immediately began sculpting the Deleted Scenes signature sound using mostly shoe horns and limp pillows. Guitarist Chris Scheffey and drummer Brian Hospital soon joined the compulsively apologetic duo to take their nefarious bedroom scuzz into a live setting.

In 2007 that Deleted Scenes stumbled upon a surrealistic plop of a record called Sookie Jump by one "L. Skell" (of The Rude Staircase), and immediately went on a crusade to hunt down the now bald and olfactorily unpleasant recluse. Wearing sneakers, the band drove up to Skell's West Philadelphia dungeon, only to find him in a salvia, nutmeg and EPMD-induced stupor. After haranguing him for 10 straight hours, Skell finally agreed to help in the creation of what would become Birdseed Shirt.

Following tender sessions with heroic soundsmith J. Robbins, the band holed up in Skell's dark, dank hermitage for 17 months collecting like stamps every last perfumed essence of sound until what resulted was not only a mellifluous, anthemic collage of existential joy and despair, but the best pop record of 2009. Dig!