Stream Apex Manor’s The Year of Magical Drinking

Updated:

January 20, 2011 7:33 pm

Videos by American Songwriter

Apex Manor is the newborn brainchild of Ross Flournoy. A West Tennessean by birth, Flournoy became a Southern Californian at the age of eleven upon his parents’ moving out west. Growing up he listened to Big Star, Teenage Fanclub, and The Beatles. Like any proper SoCal youth, he started playing in rock bands, and by 2004 his band The Broken West was getting ready to break: a deal with Merge Records, a tour with Fountains of Wayne and The National, and a placement on the hit TV show and godsend to any indie act, Grey’s Anatomy.

The Broken West disbanded though, and Flournoy found himself in the Pasadena suburbs with a car that wouldn’t start and enough beer to share with the neighborhood lawn workers. Enter writer’s block. Months and months of no creation. It took a songwriting contest to pull Ross out of his rut; the one-week deadline of NPR’s Monitor Mix songwriting contest was just the motivation he needed.

25 new songs came out of this tear. Demos were then made with former Broken West band mate Brian Whelan, and soon thereafter Apex Manor and The Year of Magical Drinking were born. Whether or not there is any connection to Joan Didion’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking, we cannot confirm. But her book is about is about the year following her husband’s death and the irrational thoughts of denial that come along with such trauma, and…Flournoy’s old band died in a sense? Maybe that’s a stretch.

At any rate, Apex Manor’s The Year of Magical Drinking is set to be released January 25 by Merge Records. Hear the record in its entirety here.