You'll find a Suicide Bride in almost any big city you care to visit, but few are more impressive than the Colorado Street Bridge connecting Pasadena to Los Angeles, which earned its nickname by being the scene of suicides in triple figures. It's also the scene of a photo shoot in which singer-songwriters Eric Caboor and David Kauffman posed on the deserted structure, capturing an image that would eventually inform the spare, detached mood-and title-of their majestic debut album 1984's Songs From Suicide Bride. Indeed, there;s a fatalistic quality of this LP that has much to do with its origins.
Home-recorded on a four-track, Songs From Suicide Bridge was released on the pair's own Donkey Soul Music in 1984. If this were a movie, the album would have been a huge success. Instead, the 500 copies pressed found their way to few willing ears. Though real life encroached, Caboor and Kauffmann continued to work together, releasing albums as The Drovers in 1989 and 1992. Now, their debut is to be released by Light In The Attic Records with brand new liner notes by Sam Sweet. Hopefully, it will finally find its audience – a listener who can see hope in the darkness. “People would tell us those songs were depressing,” Caboor says in his interview with Sweet, “but it wasn't depressing to us. In a lot of cases, playing those songs in that little room was one of the only things that made us feel better.”