About
“One of the Twin Cities’ most sophisticated songwriters.” – Star Tribune
Munson-Hicks Party Supplies is a family business rumored to keep sporadic hours on the weedy outskirts of the Twin Cities and a musical collaboration between John Munson, who does most of the singing, and Dylan Hicks, who writes the songs. They make groovily bookish music—English majors might dig it, but non-English speakers won’t be bored—inspired by far-flung alliances between interpretative singers and less spotlit writers. Munson, best known as a founding member of Trip Shakespeare, Semisonic, and the New Standards, is the group’s bassist as well as its principal singer; Hicks, who’s also a novelist, plays piano. The pair are joined by guitarist Zacc Harris, organist Kevin Gastonguay, and drummer Noah Levy.
The project was first broached during a session for Hicks’s Munson-produced 2017 album, Ad Out. Delighted by Munson’s backing vocals, Hicks suggested they make an album of Munson singing Hicks’s songs.
First, though, Munson and Hicks drafted a musical, Princess Pam, centered on a rebellious heir apparent to the British throne who flees the palace, goes incognito, and forms a rock band in Minneapolis. Staging musical theater requires a lot of—how to put it?—money, so while the pair waited for investors to queue up, they turned the Munson Sings Hicks idea into a band, and started by recasting some of Hicks’s more autonomous Pam songs.
The lyrics are witty and literate—“Somewhere my pace began to slow,” admits one narrator, “on the road from Judy Blume to Michel Foucault”—but Munson and Hicks are equally devoted to melody, harmony, and groove, and the band is on fire. Munson again proves to be an expressive and inventive singer, and his resonant baritone is complemented and contrasted by Hicks’s reedier but similarly inviting voice.
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