BY APOLLINE BERTY

In print | Published November 20, 2008 — Updated November 23, 2008 17:10

“I have food poisoning, but don’t pay attention to that,” Andrew Hoepfner, the front man of Brooklyn-based Creaky Boards said, showing a small but intimate Olde Club audience the bucket he brought with him on stage at a performance last Friday, Nov. 14. Playing songs off of their latest album, “Brooklyn Is Love,” the four-member indie pop group combined early 50s and 60s pop, Beach Boys-esque harmonies, jaunty keyboards and wistful, dreamy lyrics to bring Swarthmore a fun, earnest and lightheartedly youthful performance full of soaring melodies, foot-stomping rhythms and hometown nostalgia. And though he brought the bucket on stage, Hoepfner never ended up using it. “I think I’m feeling better,” he admitted after playing the first song. “Music is a healing force.”

Though Creaky Boards is a four-piece, it is Hoepfner who remains at its center. Adopting the moniker when he moved to New York City in 2004, Hoepfner has made Creaky Boards his creative project, writing music about the city that seems to be a perpetual wellspring of inspiration.

“We’re all song writers but this is Andrew’s project, where he writes the songs,” Creaky Boards keyboardist Dan Costello said, explaining that each band member has his own band outside of Creaky Boards. “Andrew’s not only responsible for writing the songs and playing a lot of the parts on the album, but he also recorded them in his room,” Costello added.

Although Hoepfner and drummer Michael David Campbell have known each other since childhood, the rest of the members of the band met through the songwriter scene in the East Village. Beginning as a folk-punk duo with Hoepfner and trumpeter Jason Benjamin in the winter of 2004, Creaky Boards released its first album, “Where’s the Sunshine?” in 2005, and though the structure of the band remains fluid as Hoepfner’s friends migrate eastward from Michigan and join, they consistently create music that is idiosyncratic, buoyantly poppy and surprisingly fresh. Although Hoepfner’s chronic hand pain almost forced the group to disband toward the end of 2005, Hoepfner’s ubiquitous desire to use the springboard of creativity that New York life offers to create caused Creaky Boards to re-emerge one year later.

Inching their way into the spotlight over the summer, Creaky Boards garnered some attention over a video Hoepfner posted on YouTube in which he insisted that Coldplay frontman Chris Martin copied the melody of the band’s (ironically titled) song “The Songs I Didn’t Write” for their iTunes hit, “Viva La Vida.”

“Here’s the thing on this whole thing, it was a PR stunt and it worked. We had no idea that it would work that much, but a lot of people saw it and that’s great,” lead guitarist Darwin Deez said. The band then joked that they’re now rolling in money with fancy cars, but Andrew still sees the video as just a fun project he did over the weekend, not expecting that thousands of people would end up watching it.

“Listen up bands out there, even this goldmine of PR with this Coldplay scandal we created hasn’t gotten us anywhere even though a million people have seen our video,” Deez said. “To bands out there, the secret is tour, don’t waste you time on PR,” he added.

Creaky Boards plans to tour Europe in February, bringing vocal harmonies and enchanting melodies to Germ­any, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands and France.

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