“The band has an intimate urgency that uncrosses arms and impels involvement, and their sound invokes the Band if they had Dirty Projectors’ skewed sense of song structure.” PITCHFORK

Coke-bottle clear colored vinyl LP.

“This is the part of the song when we come together.” Adam Schatz’s voice rings out in the flickering candlelight of Manhattan Inn. Last summer, he began a monthly series in the Greenpoint bar’s piano-anchored back room, built to bring his friends together to play music. And Schatz – who plays in Man Man and Father Figures, co-produces Winter Jazzfest, founded Search & Restore, and has wielded his saxophone on numerous stages and on recordings for bands like Vampire Weekend (see “Diane Young) and Those Darlins – has a lot of friends. But on this warm summer night, the man that energizes so many NYC scenes stood on a piano bench, gazing somewhere only he could see, and declared his own: “There’s no before. There’s no after. There’s only this.” This is Landlady.

The song was “Above My Ground,” a disarming sing-along anthem and a wide window into Schatz – the songwriter, the multi-instrumentalist, the vocalist. Over the past three years, Landlady has evolved alongside its busy leader, self-releasing Keeping To Yourself in 2011 and solidifying into a striking five-member lineup that includes Mikey Freedom Hart (Sinkane, Albert Hammond Jr., Bleachers), Ian Chang (Son Lux, Matthew Dear, Father Figures), Ian Davis, and Booker Stardrum. Landlady’s new album and Hometapes debut, Upright Behavior, is out this summer.

“I’ve never heard music that hit my heart and my brain quite like this,” said Hometapes co-founder Sara Padgett Heathcott, who discovered a kindred spirit in Schatz and a gateway to timelessness in Landlady’s music. “Paul McCartney, Je Lynne, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Sly Stone, maybe even Frank Black – these are the names that echo around the canyon that Schatz walked me into with a few rough recordings sent to me last year.” A chance meeting of the two at SXSW, where Schatz joined Akron/Family and Matthew E. White on stage at Hometapes’ Friend Island event, evolved into a mission to share Landlady’s music and the universe that surrounds it.

“Landlady are that rare band where the notion of genre seems downright laughable,” wrote I Guess I’m Floating after seeing Landlady’s multiple knockout performances at SXSW, which included a special performance of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass at Hometapes’ Eighth Annual Friend Island. The band, including special guests like Kelly Pratt (Arcade Fire) and Jared Samuel (Sean Lennon) vividly recreated the classic album, bringing the spirit of Schatz’s Manhattan Inn series to Texas for a temporary-yet-eternal moment.