Band Says Hi to Duke Coffeehouse

Appeared in the March 22, 2007, edition of Recess, the weekly arts and entertainment section of Duke University's independent daily newspaper, The Chronicle.

For a vampire, Eric Elbogen is pretty subdued. He doesn't speak with a creepy accent, his hair isn't slicked back and his bushy brown beard gives him an appearance more befitting Amish Pennsylvania than Draculian Transylvania.

But Elbogen, lead crooner for indie-pop trio Say Hi to Your Mom, softly sings lyrics like, "Most days these fangs are inside someone," and "I-I-I am gonna drink your blood." Clearly garlic and sunlight don't top his list of favorite things.

Elbogen, who also plays guitar, bass and synthesizer, isn't the first to write an album about vampires. (To this reporter's surprise, a Google search of "'concept album,' vampires" produced about 45,300 hits.) But he may be the first to suggest that some vampires are "people just like you and me who happen to get their nourishment from drinking blood," as the liner notes for 2006's Impeccable Blahs read.

Elbogen's murmurings--melancholy tunes about bloodsuckers who lash out at the world while trying to conceal their inner darkness--work, in a strange way. Even though he told Recess that in the absence of grander motives he just thought it would be fun to write a vampire record, the metaphor allows Elbogen to consider these themes in a more creative way than many of his "woe is me" contemporaries in the indie realm.

Not that Elbogen takes this stuff too seriously.

"It's not like we're going up on stage in black capes and goth makeup," he said in an interview Monday. "It's all pretty lighthearted."

And although Elbogen said most of his fans pick up on the tongue-in-cheek nature of his vampire songs, not everyone got the joke.

"I got one MySpace message from this goth kid who thought it was the worst vampire record ever because he heard it was a record about vampires and he was looking for something a lot darker and more goth," he said.

By day, in addition to writing and performing modest, lo-fi ditties (of both the vampiric and non-vampiric variety), Elbogen also manages Euphobia Records, a label he founded in 2002 to put out his albums when no one else would.

Such multitasking came at a price in the band's early days. Elbogen said trying to juggle his music with his business obligations sometimes left him too exhausted to facilitate the creative process. But once he started selling more records and attracting bigger crowds, Elbogen was able to hire a staff to handle the more mundane aspects of record labeldom.

"I'm no longer having to worry about filling mail orders when we're on tour, which I did for many, many years," he said.

When asked about the prospect of signing with a record company, the shy impassivity of Elbogen's tone disappears. "Most labels are pretty incompetent, and of the ones that I do think are competent, there aren't many that I think could sell more records than I sell myself," he said.

Biting criticism. But what else would you expect from a vampire?

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