Posted on Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - 10:27 am:

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Rising up on a wave of breezy harmonies and twelve-string acoustic guitars comes Maplewood, evoking a joyride up the Pacific Coast Highway…

For the five musicians who make up Maplewood, classic AM gems like “Ventura Highway” and “Make It with You” evolved from guilty pleasure to buried treasure: In such castoff anthems of mellowness, Maplewood found improbable inspiration, creating something irresistibly fresh from a lost and forsaken genre. Like the scent of night jasmine, the Maplewood sound wafts from the canyons to the beaches and out into the desert, an ode to a California ideal mapped out by such precursors as America, Bread, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Stone Canyon Band, John Phillips, The Byrds, 70s Beach Boys, and even -- gasp -- CSNY.

Drummer Ira Elliot began his career as a teen with the legendary NYC garage combo The Fuzztones. He went on to play with Nada Surf and the acclaimed indie septet Champale. (He’s also accompanied Ray Davies and Ric Ocasek.) Also from Champale comes singer/songwriter/guitarist Mark Rozzo, a part-time Angeleno who, along with fellow singer/songwriter/guitarist Steve Koester (formerly of seminal Midwestern punksters Punchdrunk and more recently of Koester), came up with the Maplewood idea in 2001 while wasting time surfing for orange-crate art on the Internet. Native Georgian Craig Schoen, from the upstart NYC indie-bluegrass outfit Winterville and occasional stints with Cub Country, chips in his Crosby-esque harmonies and records the band in his homey basement studio in, oddly enough, Brooklyn. Maplewood began laying down tracks back in the winter following 9-11, and, with the help of Austin transplant Jude Webre on bass (The Places), are now preparing to release their debut LP, featuring some tasty pedal steel from Sparklehorse's Alan Weatherhead and a few other guest appearances.

Call it canyon rock, call it breezy, call it desperado dust. Listening to Maplewood is like watching a desert sunrise, like spending a dappled afternoon up in the orange groves, like taking a moon-lit walk on the beach – and a swig of dandelion wine – with the one you love the most…

REVIEWS

"Maplewood...evokes a mythic American pastoral of pleasant valley Sundays replete with Mayan hammocks swinging 'neath the flowering trees." -- Pop Matters

"Like other fun things that cause you to romanticize the past, Maplewood make you nostalgic for something you may not really have experienced. They don't sound exactly like America or Bread or the Byrds or the Flying Burrito Brothers, but they sound exactly how what you remember those bands sounded like." -- New York Press

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