The Local 913: 3 Easy Secrets
"I like weird oddities and old stuff," says Kirk Salopek from 3 Easy Secrets, "My wife might say I’m a bit of a junk collector, but I find value in some of those things if they’ve been around. It makes you wonder what was happening to them 40 or 50 years ago. Who was messing with it? Who had it? Where was it? What were they using it for? It was being used. It was around, you know, it was around people so I’m intrigued by that a little bit." 3 Easy Secrets has a new EP out that features a quirky, retro, neon-colored matchbook on its front cover. "It was in a junk drawer at my parents’ house when I was a kid," says Salopek, "It had matches in it at that point and I thought that it was just the most bizarre design. It’s so nonsensical, but so cool looking so I always kept it. I thought this has to be album artwork. It has to be."
Salopek is a bandleader and a composer at heart and through the years, a good deal of the music he made was instrumental. When it comes to lyrics, Salopek is okay with taking a back seat. "The lyrical content never meant much to me and it hasn’t been until the last 10 years or so where I’ve really dived back into things were the lyrics, the story is everything," he says.
For the stories being told on 3 Easy Secrets, Salopek reached out to different singers, including John Schisler from the Pittsburgh band New Invisible Joy who wrote the lyrics for and sang on a song called “Bayonets and Bowstrings.” According to Salopek, "The singer came in to completely written instrumental pieces that probably were a little busy and probably not a dream for a singer. I really focus attention on sonics and structures and ways to layer instruments and that’s what I think about mostly, so I’m always happy to hand things off to somebody and see what their lyrical interpretation is."
