Details of
Jersey Town
by Peter Karp


Producer: Peter Karp
Engineer: Dae Bennett
Recorder At: Rose Cottage Studios, Bennett Studios
Mastered By: Glenn Thomas


About the Album

Peter Karp hails from Leonia, New Jersey, a town of culture and arts, wedged between the tough working-class river towns along the Hudson River, one mile across from NYC. In the 1960s, the rhythms of northern New Jersey pulsed hard with urgency. Perhaps it was due to its dense population of first generation European immigrants thrown together with Latinos from South America, Mexico, and Cuba, combined with African Americans from the southern states in the nation’s post–WWII second Great Migration. It was here in the grayness, grit, din, and relentless rush-hour traffic, amidst cold and crumbling rusted steel bridges and dark overpasses, beneath looming loading cranes that towered like prehistoric skeletons over billowing refineries and post-apocalyptic swamplands, at the last chance and final stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, that Peter Karp was born.

Jersey Town is a gritty, fierce homage to the state and the place where he honed his storytelling skills and aggressive guitar chops. The sound is real, relentless, jubilant, dark, tenacious, hard, hollow, and smart-ass. 11 original songs and stories about the people he played for, real and imagined, night after night in every shot and beer joint up and down the NJ Turnpike.

 



Special Thanks

JERSEY TOWN by PETER KARP

1. MOJO JAM (special guest Dennis Gruenling)
2. BABY HOLD TIGHT
3. HOUSE FULL OF LOVE
4. THAT SMILE (special guest Sue Foley)
5. THE MAN I USED TO BE
6. FAITH
7. TOOTH AND NAIL (special guest Rick Vito)
8. FATE IS A TRAIN
9. THIS ROAD (special guest Rick Vito)
10. WHAT HAS HAPPENED HERE?
11. WITHOUT YOU (special guests John Ginty and Mark Johnson)