BY LIANA KATZ

In print | Published February 21, 2008

Andrew Rose Gregory ’04 looks like his music. His wiry frame is a perfect match for his sparse guitar-and-vocals-based songs about love, heartbreak and murder.

Once a member of Swarthmore’s favorite plaid-clad a cappella group, Gregory returned to his alma mater this past Saturday to play a joint Olde Club show with Sixteen Feet.

It was cold in Olde Club. Very cold. Still, a dedicated flock of Sixteen Feet fans huddled within the unheated building’s stone walls. This was my first a cappella concert at Swarthmore (don’t ask me how I held out this long) and I was already impressed by such devotion.

In spite of, and perhaps due to, the relatively small size of the audience, Sixteen Feet gave an especially animated performance of their repertoire. Their renditions of everything from the classic “Sh-boom” to the White Stripe’s “Fell in Love with a Girl,” with solo vocals by Wren Elhai ‘08, displayed the depth and nuances of Sixteen Feet’s talents. For this first-timer, however, it was Ben Starr’s ‘11 heartfelt rendering of R. Kelly’s “Real Talk” that stole the entire show.

In between Sixteen Feet’s two sets, Gregory took to the stage and played songs both from his recently released album “The Color Red & Other Songs about the Power of Love” and from the earlier days of his song-writing career.

Gregory’s music is a beautifully troubling mix of simple guitar melodies and folk-tinged lyrics. He often weaves the tender with the sinister in order to create a narrative that sounds deeply personal. As Gregory phrases it, his music tells of “the evil love can do but also the good [that it can do].”

Despite his budding critical acclaim, not long ago Gregory was a Swattie like any other. He took Physics 7 and then majored in Religion. He had a WSRN show, sang in Sixteen Feet and played Ultimate Frisbee.

Frustrated by the lack of creative autonomy given to him in Sixteen Feet, Gregory learned to play the guitar and penned his first song featuring the brilliant lyric, “If I were a pimp, would you be my ho?”

Gregory’s musicianship quickly matured as he was given the position of teaching songwriting at the University of Virginia for four subsequent summers. Having graduated from Swarthmore in 2004 with the mind-set that songwriting was “really something [he] could do,” Gregory wrote and performed prolifically.

Ultimately, Gregory burnt himself out and was forced to take a break from the guitar altogether. It took knee surgery and the healing of a broken heart to give Gregory back the “mojo” he needed to record “The Color Red,” which has tracks he describes as “organic” and “the best things [I] ever wrote.”

When I returned from Olde Club with frostbitten toes, I immediately put on “The Color Red” to see how Gregory’s sound transferred from stage to disc. Thankfully, the recording studio left Gregory’s live music mostly untouched. Little had been added to what he had played at Olde Club, save for duets on each track and the subtle presence of a mandolin and pedal steel guitar. I could attempt to make some tendentious comparisons to various musical greats here.

Yet there is something uniquely intimate as well as straightforward about what I heard on “The Color Red” that eschews categorization. For Gregory, the saying “Less is more” is not trite but incredibly inspirational.

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