The Beirut connection

(Photo by Ben Chrisman/MySpace)

Over the weekend I went to a party and was talking to my former boss, Dan Montgomery. Dan is an old punk rocker from San Francisco and a ukulele player. He's into some good, fairly obscure music.
Still, I was surprised to hear from Dan that the leader of the band Beirut has a connection to Newport News.
I later did a quick Google of "Beirut" and "Newport News" and came up with a story from the New York magazine that confirms it. Zach Condon, the mastermind behind Beirut, lived here for at least a few years when he was a kid.

Here's an excerpt from the story:

"Collision is a large part of Condon’s style, inherent to its appeal. His record is not so much world music as a global mash-up. He first picked up a trumpet as a grade-­schooler in Newport News, Virginia. “Newport was a coastal town. I was always on a boat. It made me look outwards.” But Condon’s family moved to New Mexico in his teens, where he started making lo-fi recordings on a synthesizer, inspired by the jangly, slapdash rock of bands like the Magnetic Fields and Neutral Milk Hotel. “I was so angry to be landlocked, I just wanted to stay inside and make music. One day I just thought, Can I sing? And I tried, and I could.”

Read the whole article here.

First off, nobody calls Newport News, "Newport" for short, so I figure he was either misquoted or he really has very little memory of this place. Secondly, it looks like in a weird way his journey from the Virginia Peninsula to New Mexico inspired him to get into making music. Hey, it ain't much, but it's something.

I'm going to try to e-mail Condon and see if he can tell us more about his Virginia days.