Corey Dargel

Corey Dargel is a composer, lyricist, and singer of songs that "smartly and impishly blur the boundaries between contemporary classical idioms and pop" (New York Times). His gentle assault on the pop idiom creates a tension that pervades his music: Deadpan and detached vocals reveal heartbreaking intimacies, awkward and obtrusive drum patterns struggle against fragile harmonies, vocals and music uneasily opposing each other as songs stumble to their ends.

Dargel has been called "an innovator both challenging and catchy" (Time Out New York) and "an ironic pop icon... dangerously close to commercial viability" (Village Voice). Salon praises his songs’ “rococo ingenuity” and “sustained bursts of lyrical brilliance,” and according to Gramophone, he has “a compositional sense guaranteed to keep close listeners on their toes. Words and music are truly equal partners....”

Dargel’s critically acclaimed debut album, Less Famous Than You, is a collection of songs about falling in love with famous (or semi-famous) people. It was released on Use Your Teeth (London) in May 2006 and named one of the Top Ten Albums of 2006 by Time Out New York. His forthcoming album, Other People’s Love Songs, will feature the first fourteen custom-made love songs created through Dargel’s "Commission a Love Song" project, hailed by Toronto Globe and Mail’s Carl Wilson as “a neat, and profitable, rebuke to the self-expression model. Songwriters! Express other people's feelings!"

Dargel has performed on bills with Joanna Newsom, Final Fantasy, Grizzly Bear, Anti-Social Music, Young People, and others. In 2006 he was featured on the American Composers Orchestra’s season at Carnegie Hall and was selected to participate in “Composers on the Edge” as part of the New Yorker Festival.

Dargel is a founding member of the Brooklyn-based experimental theater company Laboratory Theater. He is a 2007 participant in HERE Arts Center's HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) in NYC. Other residencies include the MacDowell Colony, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and New Dramatists.

Dargel’s music-theater piece about love and voluntary amputation, Removable Parts, premiered in September 2007 at HERE Arts Center . A national tour is planned for the 2008-09 season. For more about Removable Parts, visit the show's website.

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