Try The Pie: Rest  LP/CS/DD   (HHBTM Records)

Release date: November 13, 2015

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Bio: ‘Life is so much better when you live like you have one.’
- ‘Eight’

Try The Pie is the songwriting project of San Jose based musician/writer/artist Bean Tupou. A scaled-back affair compared to last year’s Domestication, Rest is a seductive mix of sugar & citrus, as achingly sincere as Kim Deal at her finest.. You can’t help holding your breath to hear how the story ends.

"Alu'a" is the Tongan word for goodbye when you are staying and the other person is going. "Rest" is an album dedicated to this sentiment. I wrote the songs over a duration of three years (2005-2008) and recorded it in the last year by myself in my room in San Francisco. Sometimes you can hear someone doing dishes or the beep of a dying smoke-detector. This album is an example of the slow, whispering tempo, slanted harmonies and embellished metaphors that I grew up listening to.”

As part of the bands Sourpatch and Crabapple, and as one of the creative forces behind the Think and Die Thinking Collective, Tupou has been a fixture on the South Bay’s DIY punk scene, crafting socially-conscious and catchy punk rock while helping creates spaces that are open, accepting, and fun—a universe of gender-neutral pronouns & queer-positive politics.

It’s a record so intimate it feels almost like you’re eavesdropping. You unconsciously hold your breath to keep from being noticed. The songs are littered with household objects, embodied and alive. References to neighbors and roommates abound. Listen to ‘Seahorse’ and hear a story of immobilization and the struggle to stay afloat, simultaneously wistful & withdrawn, youthful & yearning.

‘...you are trying to figure out who you are and what you are about, so you make the decision to deal with things privately. When I made Rest, I made CD-Rs and just slipped them underneath my roommates' doors and gave it to people I knew.’

Rest is the sound of a fragile sensitivity—the avalanche of life communicated through tentative wishes and plaintive regrets. An album so open and honest that its very existence is an act of bravery. And when so much of our lives are consumed by fear and what others will think of us, the masks we create to make other people happy, we need records like this more than ever. HHBTM records is beyond proud to be associated with a record like this and everything it stands for.