Michael Brown, the Left Banke's brilliant baroque-pop leader, dies at 65 | OregonLive.com: Michael Brown, the initial guiding force behind influential 1960s pop act the Left Banke, has died, the group's Tom Finn announced on Facebook on Thursday.
Brown was the keyboardist and main songwriter for the group, though he left in 1967 after just one album. He co-wrote and wrote, respectively, the band's best-known songs, "Walk Away Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina" -- tracks that also served as the title of their classic debut album. The band's use of strings and harpsichord earned them the label "baroque-pop," while their tuneful sensitivity echoes on in the work of acts such as Belle & Sebastian, Elliott Smith and Jens Lekman, whose "Black Cab" sampled the band's "I've Got Something On My Mind."
3 comments:
Sorry to hear this. I just had my daughter download "Pretty Ballerina" for me (I don't have an iPod; so I get my girls to download my faves and burn them to a CD for me) a few weeks back and she loved it so much she put it on her iPod too.
"Pretty Ballerina" is coming right up as the Song of the Day.
There's just too much of this going around. Worse, he was younger than me.
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