Karen O Debuts Native Korean Rock Side Project in Brooklyn

Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O has been easing up on the beer-spewing, stocking-ripping banshee-tornado whirlwind she's known for unleashing onstage — these days, she just wants to sing some old fashioned love songs. For the past few years, O has been recording lo-fi songs under the name Native Korean Rock, and last night she joined a few friends at Brooklyn's Union Pool for an evening of ballads fleshed out by little more than a few plucked strings, a guitar strum or two, and her own wrenching voice, delivered with a big, bright-lipsticked smile. (You can hear some of the music on Native Korean Rock's MySpace page.) Dressed in a sailor suit with dramatic silent-film-star makeup, O looked like the subject of a classic painting: she performed against a blue-sky backdrop, and her band donned navy-themed costumes, playing in a makeshift "boat" with a Korean-flag sail while sound clips of crashing waves and noisy seagulls played softly in the background. O dedicated the end of her first set to "summer love," before launching into "Indian Summer," an ode to a romance that goes on longer than planned. No such luck for the set itself: at a mere 30 minutes, it ended much too soon.

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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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