Ebaby! Blog

It often comes up in lessons that Beren is in a band. (Check out this one about touring or this one about recording at home.) Her band plays really loud, broken garage rock and is called Eat Skull. Unless you’re into garage rock or live in Portland, you probably haven’t heard of them. But that might change soon.

A couple of months ago MTV came to our hometown of Portland, Oregon, to make a video about the music scene here. Beren and her band are featured in it. They’re playing at a house party which happens a lot in Portland.

Until this happened, Amanda was the most famous member of the English, baby! cast. She acts in commercials, but she’s going to have to step it up and get a role on a sitcom or something if she wants to compete.

Note the drunk person falling into Beren’s drums at around the 5 minute mark. Oh, and here’s a bit of interesting trivia. Beren is commonly mistaken for Kathy Foster of the Thermals when she goes out in Portland. Kathy’s featured in the video as well. Do you see a resemblance? I think it’s kind of a stretch. They used to have the same hair cut but it looks like Kathy cut hers.

This Monday the music lesson will be about Lefty, a one-armed guitarist who performs on street corners near the English, baby! downtown Portland office.

This is definitely the best taking it to the streets video we’ve made so far. It’s not just a slice of life, it’s a whole story. Watch Lefty play and talk about how he thought his days as a musician were over when he lost his arm.

When I was learning Spanish, some of the hardest people to understand were older men with gravelly voices. But I think Lefty does a pretty good job of annunciating for a guy with a real whiskey voice. Hopefully our members can get some practice understanding people who sound like him from this video.

I also interviewed Lefty at length for an upcoming newspaper piece I’m going to write. We sat at his “office,” a table at the old town bar Captain Ankny’s Well, which also happens to be where we film lots of our lessons (like this one).

Every other person who walked by knew Lefty and said hello. He has a lot of fans around town. Some of them are even photographers. He let me scan in some photos people have given him over the last three years he’s been performing at the Saturday Market, an open air bazaar in Portland. The ones in this post are my favorites.