Artist description The band Goats in Trees comes from Brooklyn, New York and features Monica Cohen, Jason Crigler, Jeff Hill and John Mettam. Goats has one CD currently available called "When the Morning Comes," which is on Rudy Records. The CD is available via www.goatsintrees.com, CDBaby.com and Amazon.com.

Music Style Interstellar Pop/Soul Journeys with Twinkling Guitars and Sad/Sweet Singing

Musical Influences The Band, Elliot Smith, Ricki Lee Jones, Joni, Beatles, Miles

Artist History Three years in the New York area. Tours in the Northeast and Germany. Airplay on Vin Scelsa's Idiot's Delight.

Group Members Monica Cohen, Jason Crigler, Jeff Hill, John Mettam

Instruments guitars, bass, drums, vocals

Albums When the Morning Comes, 1998

Press Reviews Goats in Trees are setting their sights high The Record, North Jersey, Thursday, January 4, 2001By BOB IVRY, Staff WriterCall Monica Cohen a late bloomer. She was 25 when she first began noodling around on a guitar. A design school graduate from Boston, Cohen always thought she'd be an artist. But she had written a few songs and performed them at a Brooklyn coffeehouse by the time she met Jason Crigler four years ago.Call Crigler a lifer. He grew up around music and musicians. His dad conducted at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut, where he'd let Jason sit in the orchestra pit and listen to the songs of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Crigler caught the bug; he attended Berklee College of Music in Boston and was teaching guitar and playing in another of a succession of bands that, by his estimation, weren't going anywhere. During a gig at Manhattan's now-defunct Hotel Galvez, he met Cohen.Chatting after the show, Cohen and Crigler quickly learned they lived five blocks apart in Brooklyn, so they rode the train home together. Before they parted, Crigler told Cohen he was dating someone. Undaunted, Cohen asked him for a guitar lesson. "I was afraid I'd never see him again," she says.Less than a year later, Crigler's other woman was history, and Goats in Trees was born."The thing I admire most about Monica's songs are the tension and the passion," Crigler says in a phone interview from the Brooklyn apartment he shares with Cohen, with whom he's planning a June wedding. "Songs really mean something to her. She needs to sing them. All great art is like that, the need to express yourself."Cohen, 33, and Crigler, 30, split songwriting duties for the band's first release, "When the Morning Comes," which also introduced the work of the band's two other "goats," bass player Jeff Hill and drummer John Mettam. (The album is available from the band's Web site, www.goatsintrees.com.) After a successful summer tour of Germany, the band, whose music is played in the New York area on WFMU (91.1 FM) and on Vin Scelsa's "Idiot's Delight" show on WNEW (102.7 FM), is concentrating on putting together its second self-produced disc. It should be ready by early summer, Crigler says, with the majority of the songs written by Cohen."I'm quitting my day job," says Cohen, who works as a graphic designer for a small publisher in Manhattan. "I feel really determined and really strong about the music and the band. I love graphic design, but I don't need to do it like I need to do this."The sound of Goats in Trees is surprisingly laid-back for a quartet hailing from bustling New York City. But, as Crigler says, underlying those mellow tones are an intensity and a passion that hold the songs together as tautly as a clothesline. On the debut disc, Crigler and Cohen trade lead vocals. Crigler's tenor, with overtones of Darryl Hall and Stephen Stills, is fortified by a gentle electric guitar and dashes of slide guitar, while Cohen's alto originates from a deep place inside her.Crigler's songs are mostly stories -- he says his models are Bruce Springsteen and Richard Thompson -- and Cohen's tend toward poetic imagery, as in "Dead of Winter": "You look so alive in the dead of winter/I see in your eyes the look of spring/and I fall into your arms and it feels like summer/and like the wind/disappearing into the weather."Though "When the Morning Comes" shows an appealingly quiet side of the band, Crigler says a typical Goats in Trees show will include more energetic tunes and a lot of jamming. But it all comes back to the quality of the songs."I've played in a lot of bands," Crigler says. "It took me a while to find a place where I could develop my own voice."Most bands you hear can really play, but they haven't worked hard to craft a unique perspective. They have nothing to say," he adds. "With Goats in Trees, as soon as we started getting serious, we had both the musicianship and our own take on things. I'd always been trying to find that balance in a band."As for the band's singular name, Cohen says that in some Mediterranean climes, there apparently are goats that climb trees in order to eat fruit.The animals were an inspiration for artist Molly Barker. Her depiction was the stimulus for Cohen, who says she revels in the idea that "the truth is stranger than fiction."That quality makes Goats in Trees the appropriate name for a band created only because a fledgling singer-songwriter asked a cute musician for a guitar lesson. Call it luck. Call it destiny. Call it the story of a band with a future like a wide-open door.

Location Brooklyn, NY - USA

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