Mike “Sport” Murphy rose from the New York scene of the 90s to sign with the infamous Kill Rock Stars label in 1997. He would release three full length albums on the standard format of the time – the compact disc. Now, over two decades later, some of the cult singer’s best work is getting a new life on vinyl: Daylight in the Swamps – 1997-2003. It’s been a long journey for Sport, and he reflects on his career and this moment in these words.
After years of very loud music and very strong booze in the northeast US, I took a break from both and in 1997 self-released my first album, Willoughby (title based on a beloved episode of The Twilight Zone). The music aimed for indirectness and restraint, and, as with all my work, drew on the example of creative heroes, Charles Ives, Vivian Stanshall, and John Cassavetes. Slim Moon reissued it two years later on his Kill Rock Stars label. KRS also released the next album, the more elaborate and extroverted Magic Beans, and a third, Uncle, which concerned a close family member killed in the terrorist attacks on 9-11-2001. My work never quite fit in with the rest of the label’s roster, but thanks to Slim Moon’s support, it achieved modest but welcome worldwide attention.
After several small tours in Europe I recorded a fourth, unreleased album, and later self-released A Room of Voices, a double-disc “sayonara” to making music, fashioned as a junk drawer of demos and issued in a box along with magazines, comics and other ephemera. Since then I’ve written for various newspapers and magazines, coauthored and illustrated a book on industrial musicals, Everything’s Coming Up Profits, and appeared in Bathtubs Over Broadway, a film based on that book. Currently, I host an eclectic music podcast called Buckaroo Holiday and contribute weekly humor pieces to freeform radio station WFMU.
In order to compile a coherent LP out of three very distinct albums I’ve largely leaned on ballads, leaving out the rockers, humorous numbers or experimental things that comprised the rest of those highly eclectic collections. Maybe another time. For me, it’s a real joy to finally have some of my stuff out on vinyl. If, someday, a copy turns up in a thrift shop’s dollar bin, tucked among albums by Pat Benatar, The Three Tenors, and The Ray Conniff Singers, my career ambitions will have been fulfilled. And I ain’t even kidding. Slainte.
