Based in Ridgewood, NJ, Big Troubles is Ian Drennan and Alex Craig. The band’s first EP, Freudian Slips, was released in January 2010 on Blackburn Recordings: their full-length effort Worry appeared on Olde English Spelling Bee Records in 2011.
For this issue’s CD, Esopus invited 12 musical acts to create a song inspired by an artist of their choice. Inspiration could be drawn from any part of the given artist’s oeuvre, life, and/or legacy; the only rule was that the song be named after the artist in question. Despite spanning different musical genres and subjects ranging from the 16th-century sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini to young Brooklyn painter Esao Andrews, all of the songs on Esopus 14: Artists cohere beautifully, providing dynamic new interpretations of the selected artists, their lives, and their work.