Marco Tewlow has all the energy in the world as we begin our conversation about Supermarket Parking Lot’s latest album, Honesty Doesn’t Pay. This is an album for people who still love listening to a full album from start to finish, people who love catchy guitar riffs just as much as dramatic piano pieces.
While Supermarket Parking Lot is a solo project, I saw some familiar faces when Marco introduced the band at the album release party at Bond Street Guitars—Hayden “Hayfever” Merz, Dooho “Walnut” Han, Micah “The Wizard” DeSelms, Stephen “The Rake” Guerra. “And I’m Karl Marx,” Marco gave a cheeky grin and drew a chuckle from the crowd. Eyes alight in his “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar” t-shirt, Marco gets to work. He’s a connector, an integrator, laser-focused on the dynamic play between each musician on stage with him.
Watching Supermarket Parking Lot live, you can see this collaboration play out. The process, according to Marco, focuses on detailed notation that bends to improvisation. “Brothers #2: (Vampires)”, for example, was played at breakneck speed, a welcome surprise resulting in a riff that didn’t leave my head for days. Supermarket Parking Lot’s capacity to deliver a flexible live performance is one of their greatest skill sets. When Hayden broke a string before the last song of their set in Boston, Marco bought him time to change it out by vamping on “Brothers #3: (Ender)” for over 10 minutes, taking inspiration from theme songs to popular sci-fi shows and Stravinsky’s Petrushka. “The songs are always living, breathing, changing… that’s progressive rock,” Marco laughed as he added “although I guess I’m not really ‘progressing’ anything.”
I was completely unsurprised when Marco told me he was “a musical theater kid who doesn’t like musical theater.” Only someone who listened to the original 2009 folk opera version of Hadestown soundtrack could come up with the dramatic sweeps contained within this album. From the mournful pianos on “Brothers #3: (Ender)” to the quick energetic riffs on “A Favor (The Cell)”, Honesty Doesn’t Pay leans into the theatrical and dramatic side of its creator. “The more I lean into my idiosyncrasies and pretensions, the better response I get,” Marco told me.
And he has plenty of idiosyncrasies to latch onto. Triangulated between alternative “dad rock”, classical, and video game music, the classically-trained pianist has always leaned towards what he considers “unorthodox” in his music. The first time I saw Marco live, he made a habit of bending down to adjust pedals while continuing to play the piano, leaving a very talented disembodied hand like Thing from the Addams family, which really contributed to the turned-upside-down aesthetic channeled by their music.
Marco regards full length albums as a “crucial art form”, with additional creative intention given to track length and placement. He called out the special focus on the title track as the penultimate track, “Honesty Doesn’t Pay.” When playing live, Marco leverages his philosophy to target his shows, “it’s not about the individual song, but more about how it fits into the whole narrative.” Perhaps because of Marco’s reverence for the album, Honesty Doesn’t Pay is remarkably cohesive despite the genre-bending between progressive and alternative rock, playing out like a sweeping rock opera. Their eleven-minute transcendent song “Brothers #2: (Vampires)” has been “surprisingly popular” on tour, leaning hard into the progressive rock sound. Fans of alt-rock will enjoy “Forest Fires” and “In Creative Desperation, Nothing Is Ever Straightforward When It Should Be”. As for Marco, he has a soft spot for “Phantom Vibration”, which he calls a “piano song on a guitar album.”
As a cohesive album, Honesty Doesn’t Pay contains as much potential energy as kinetic energy, as much white space as color, making it a stand-out progressive rock album of the year. You can stream Honesty Doesn’t Pay on Spotify, Apple Music, and anywhere else you may find music. You can catch Supermarket Parking Lot on July 17th at Arlene’s Grocery.