Breaking Artist: Love As Laughter

Who: Indie rock vets Love as Laughter, who are finally ready to quit their day jobs with their first proper studio album Holy.

Sounds Like: The rougher side of the Seattle music scene with elements of Pavement and Neil Young thrown in the mix. After 14 years, more than 20 band members and five DIY albums under his belt, LAL frontman Sam Jayne entered the studio with the Clash producer Joe Blaney to create an album full of songs Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock calls "amazing," with tracks like the Talking Heads-ish "All Parts of Me" and the romantic rocker "Konny and Jim."

Vital Stats:

• Jayne was once at the forefront of Seattle's punk scene with his band Lync. Fans of that band included Brock and a pre-Mellow Gold Beck, who recruited Jayne to sing on his One Foot in the Grave. Brock will release Holy on his own Glacial Pace record label.

• While his fans and friends went on to rock stardom, 34-year-old Jayne formed Love as Laughter after Lync broke up in 1994, and it's been a long road of unsteady jobs since, including his current gig in a Brooklyn pizzeria. "Those guys are way more responsible and savvier than I am," he says. "But I'm a little more focused on being successful now, partly because I'm sick of finding a new job every four months."

• With the good press surrounding Holy, Jayne and the current LAL incarnation are getting set for a two-month tour that will force Jayne to make some serious life choices. "I think with the record coming out so well, I'm going to have to get up in the morning sometime. That's going to be hard," Jayne jokes.

Hear It Now: Holy is in stores now. Click above to watch Love as Laughter's exclusive acoustic performance of "Babyshambles."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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