http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/news/05-10/05.shtml#breakups


My Favorite, Troubled Hubble, Del Cielo Break Up

Jason Toon, Kati Llewellyn, and Amy Phillips report:
Times are rough for rock bands right now, what with high gas prices
causing the cost of touring to skyrocket, and all those evil
downloaders stealing music (ha). A rash of breakups has rocked the
indie world recently, affecting the synth-pop, nerd-rock and punk
scenes alike.

Although their debut long-player didn't emerge until 1999, Long
Island quintet My Favorite were digging through the pockets of the
80s when that decade's corpse was barely cold. Now the band's 14-year
existence has come to an end, according to an announcement from
frontdude/songwriter Michael Grace, Jr. "Andrea Vaughn has left My
Favorite," Grace wrote in mid-September the band's website, speaking
of his longtime singing/keyboarding partner in pop. "And thus, by all
rights, that chapter should be closed...She was the Anna Karina to my
Jean-Luc Godard, the poetry in my Alphaville."

If that seems like a melodramatic send-off for a bandmate, keep in
mind that Vaughn was also his ex-wife. Although the couple divorced
several years ago, both stayed in My Favorite, a rare accomplishment
among rock n roll divorcees. "Somehow, the band survived for four or
five years after we stopped being a couple," Grace told Pitchfork in
a phone conversation last week. "I'm proud of it."

So why, with that mess safely in the past, did Vaughn decide to
leave? "I think she was just tired of being in an indie band," Grace
said. "There's an element of exhaustion to it, always some sort of
wall you're trying to break through. She didn't think being a singer
in a bad was what she wanted to do any more. If you take her at her
word, it was just time to, you know, get some reading done."

Although a planned My Favorite album is "3/4 finished," according to
Grace, it's a substantially different affair from the shimmering
synth-pop the band was known for. "This was our first, dare I say it,
rock n roll record," Grace said. "Our music had always been recorded
a piece at a time: keyboards one week, some electronic drums the next
week, guitar the next week. This time we just went into the Walkmen's
studio [Marcata Recording] and told (drummer) Tod to hit his drums as
hard as he could." The unfinished album will form the core repertoire
of Grace's next band, tentatively called the Secret History and
including most or all of the rest of My Favorite. "It would be a
shame not to use those recordings," he said. "It won't be a My
Favorite record with a different singer. It'll be somewhere between
My Favorite and Hedwig and the Angry Inch - the great Ziggy Stardust
art-glam record I never had the confidence to make." Hmm... kinda
sounds like the Killers.

My Favorite leaves a recorded legacy of two full-lengths and a
handful of EPs. A bizarre postmortem was provided by the CBS daytime
soap "The Bold and the Beautiful", when the Faves' song "Homeless
Club Kids" was used to soundtrack a scene involving some sort of
bridal fashion show. While well-dressed scions of the ruling class
look on adoringly at the model's pirouettes, Vaughn sings about "the
ghosts of dead teenagers." The only line of dialogue in the scene
comes near the end: "Maybe there will be a miracle today."

For Grace, Vaughn, and the scattered coterie of My Favorite, the
miracle never came, but Grace was stunned by the outpouring of
letters from anguished fans as word about the breakup filtered out.
"I wasn't surprised by the amount, but by the emotion and
vulnerability that people were willing to reveal, just to let me know
the band meant something to them," he said. Band manager and Double
Agent Records honcho Peter Green adds, "We were getting these amazing
letters from kids, crying 'Katrina devastated my home, now My
Favorite broke up.' (The band members) were asking me how to judge if
they succeeded or failed as a band. I told them to judge by those
letters." We'd insert some kind of snarky comment here, but we just
don't have the heart.