Stream: Alex Ebert, ‘In Support of the 5ame Dude, Vols. 1 and 2’

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Alex Ebert
Alex Ebert

Alex Ebert, who fronted Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros for four albums and Ima Robot for three before that, lives in New Orleans now. But somehow we’ve never felt closer, thanks to an app (Apple only, for now) he has developed called Tuners. It’s described as “basically an audio version of Reddit,” allowing users to chat via voice notes that are audible to anyone.

There, Ebert recently revealed his next batch of music — a housecleaning, of sorts, in the way of a series of EPs titled “In Support of the 5ame Dude.” The five-song EPs are available as a single stream via Tuners, Bandcamp, Soundcloud and YouTube — and with Tuners, you get to hear him converse (or chat with him yourself) with fans about the material. (Or maybe catch him telling a good-night story).

The first batch of five songs are from around 2004, when Ima Robot were in a wrestling match with their record label. “I was lost,” he says. “I was trying to make songs that would work, because I was getting a lot of pressure from Virgin. So I said, fuck y’all, I can write a hit, and I don’t need to write it with anyone. But I started losing my instincts. … I remember feeling like a real robot.”

They are a playful group that Ebert says laid the groundwork for what he would do with the Magnetic Zeros.

The Vol. 2 EP includes collaborations, some experimental, with Magnetic Zeros members such as Josh Collazo and Nico Aglietti — the latter on the closer “Shut Your Mouth,” which was written on the night Donald Trump won election.

“Why go back now?” Ebert says of the releases, which he said are the first of at least three. “It’s cathartic. … You make it, you want to release it, but there’s bottlenecking in the process. It revisits itelf on you every once in a while, and you get the feeling that a whole part of yourself is unrealized.”

This fall, Ebert plans to release the tracks on the EPs to streaming services.

||| Listen: To parts of The Tuners thread on Vol. 1 / The Tuners thread on Vol. 2

||| Stream: “In Support of the 5same Dude, Vols. 1 and 2”