Forty years after the Hoboken music scene, Jon Klages shines on ‘Fabulous Twilight’ | Testa
Updated Apr 07, 2021;
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No discussion of the Hoboken music scene of the 1980s would be complete without the Individuals. That band’s infectious mix of pop jangle and No Wave cool helped foment the Mile Square City’s cultural renaissance.
But shortly after the group disbanded, guitarist Jon Klages decamped to the West Coast. Now, some 40 years later, he’s released his first solo album, “Fabulous Twilight,” on Danbury Fair Recordings.
As a New York City kid, Klages didn’t have to travel far to discover Hoboken. For a time, he shared a railroad flat on Jefferson Street with bandmate Glenn Morrow, whose earlier band “a” had originally talked Steve Fallon into booking live music at his family’s new restaurant, Maxwell’s.
On April 1, 2021, singer-songwriter-guitarist
Jon Klages, who helped create the Hoboken Sound as lead guitarist for the Individuals, will release Fabulous Twilight, a collection of original songs and instrumentals hailed as “an exceptionally broad and rich work … mature but still playful…[that] shows off Jon’s considerable songwriting and musicianship skills proudly” (Peter Holsapple of the dB’s and Continental Drifters).
With a songcraft, melodic inventiveness, and humor that recalls the early albums of Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman, Fabulous Twilight is a fresh and bold addition to Klages’s musical resumé. Weaving songs and instrumentals in the style of the long-players he loved as a child, Klages and producer Todd Solomon take the listener on an emotionally rich and musically diverse journey, from soulful ballads and plaintive blues to surf guitar and R&B instrumentals to a smile-raising, country-tinged ode to the Columbia House Record Club, all set against