Franklin Bruno

Musician, journalist and philosophy teacher Franklin Bruno first emerged in 1987 as the singer/guitarist for the prolific Los Angeles-based indie rock trio Nothing Paint Blue, winning wide acclaim for his relentlessly clever and verbose lyrics. Bruno co-founded the group while attending Pomona College, and in the years to follow their recording and touring activities were restricted by his graduate philosophy studies at Claremont College and subsequent teaching gig at UCLA; the first Nothing Painted Blue album, A Baby, a Blanket, a Packet of Seeds, was nevertheless issued on their own Jupa label in 1990, with Bruno's first solo effort, Suggestion Box, appearing on the Shrimper cassette label the following year. Subsequent solo outings including the Baby Huey release Hermetic Geometry and the Walt seven-inch "The Irony Engine" preceded the 1995 release of his first widely-available effort, the Simple Machines-issued A Bedroom Community. In addition to NPB, solo pursuits, and his educational career, Bruno also moonlighted as a music critic, reviewing records for CMJ Music Monthly and Puncture; much more notorious was a devastatingly hilarious review of Jeff Gomez's godawful indie rock novel Our Noise, authored for Matador Records. The solo Kiss Without Makeup followed on the Absolutely Kosher label in the spring of 2000. His next solo release, A Cat May Look at a Queen, arrived in the fall of 2002.