Last week, I talked about two great singer-songwriters in New York City, Niall Connolly and Warren Malone.  This week I want to finish up by telling you about EW Harris—“Echo Whiskey Harris,” a soft-spoken guy from Georgia who plays a lot of gigs in New York City with Niall Connolly while also performing his own great, melodic songs. EW recently finished a job at a bookstore on the Upper East Side of New York City and retreated to his cramped one-room apartment in Brooklyn to record a great 15-song CD, ‘A Waste of Water and Time.’ You have to understand that EW’s live performance is different from most singer-songwriters.  In addition to playing an acoustic guitar, he brings onstage a whole assemblage of plastic keyboards and synthesizers—the kind of gear that people would buy at Radio Shack in, say, 1983.  When EW plays a gig, what he does is fingerpick his guitar while accompanying himself with pre-recorded loops and samples of electronic whirring noises and squirrelly static.  Some of it sounds like someone tuning-in a faraway radio station.  He’ll also program his little Radio Shack synthesizer to produce riffs and beeps that he might trigger during the chorus of a song.  Somehow, all these bleeps and fuzzy bits seem to perfectly mesh with the songs he’s singing onstage. For his new CD, EW has used much of this same approach to create sprawling canvases of sound underneath his acoustic guitar.  It’s a quirky, fascinating backdrop for a collection of songs that revolve around EW's penchant for science fiction and outer space.  One song, for example, is called 'Asteroid Dance.'  Another tune, called 'Underworld,' talks about robots.  And then there’s the album’s opener, 'Supernova,' which creaks along with bells, whistles, and spoken word snippets, until it reaches a sales pitch for the water resources and mining potential of a colony near the dwarf planet, Ceres. What jumps out at me is the tremendous melancholy and isolation that runs through many of EW's songs.  There’s a cleverness in setting these songs in faraway galaxies.  But unless you listen for the little clues that we’re dealing with androids and rocket ships, what you’ll get is just a cycle of songs that seems (on the surface) to be about very basic themes of loss and heartache. Take 'My Magnetic Shoes.'  It sounds like the tale of a construction worker who worries about a foreman docking his pay for showing up late.  But you gradually gather that this guy’s daily task is “working in the vacuum” of space.  No matter how futuristic the fellow’s life might be, however, his problems are the same as everyone else’s—loneliness, fatigue, depression, a mean boss…  [FYI: When asked about 'My Magnetic Shoes,'  EW's comment was that "there's a reluctant creator/deity thing" in there.] But there’s also EW’s very smart phrasing in his lyrics.  Near the end of 'My Magnetic Shoes,' we gather that the song’s narrator has been sent to a faraway station—an isolated outpost with only robots for company.  He sighs, “When you’re lonely/You have to make friends/So I made mine just like me.” Not all the songs are so futuristic , though.  One of his best is the acoustic-soul of 'Hammerhands.'  The song’s opening line, set against a slow, Otis Redding-style stomp, declares, “They call me ol’ Hammerhands/’Cause their skulls all break the same.”  We gradually learn that Ol’ Hammerhands works at a 7-11 or some other convenience store, a dreary job that he does “for money, five days a week”—and it’s slowly killing him. I can remember the early gigs where I first saw EW playing some of these songs.  I was immediately impressed by how he could nimbly juggle all the buttons and keyboards and toys he’d set up on stage while simultaneously singing and playing guitar.  But what really moves me now is how the entire crowd at Ceol in Brooklyn, or The Red Lion on Bleecker Street, will sing along to EW’s songs.  I particularly love his very soft, Paul Simon-esque ballad 'Wind Up Dead.'  It’s a gentle, folkish tune, and it always affects me to see this big, scruffy Georgian dude leading an audience through such a quiet song.  It could be a busy night in the East Village, but inside the Red Lion, EW absolutely holds the audience.  And when he gets to the chorus, everyone sings with him, “They say that home is where the heart is/But mine’s bobbing just below my head/And if I cut it open/To have a look around/I guess I’d only wind up dead.”  [Click here to watch a live performance of 'Wind Up Dead']. That song was the first one EW wrote after moving to New York.  Since then, he’s somehow persevered amidst the rough, crowded living of New York City.  And he’s managed to record an entire album in his little apartment on a shoe-string budget.  It’s an admirable achievement, and I hope you get to hear it some day. CLICK HERE to listen to/purchase EW's new album, 'A Waste of Water and Time.'