Adam Arcuragi

One man's super-organic, supremely human Manhattan Project on happiness.

by Brian Howard

Lavinia Jones Wright

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with once-and-always Philadelphian Adam Arcuragi that now that he's living in New York, the hyper-associative singer/songwriter is thinking about sponges.

"You cannot turn around without finding something new, something old, something in transition," says Arcuragi, 30, speaking excitedly but measuredly on his cell phone about his new environs. "It's so crazy. And it's like there's a lot of scientists who are working on the idea of a superorganism. They look at sponges and they realize that sponges are actually like colonies of autonomous organisms that all live and work together. It's hit that critical mass point of there being enough individual humans that now the humans are acting as superorganisms. It's fascinating to watch it go."

Interesting aside, yes, but also a spot-on analog for the way Arcuragi the musician and incidental bandleader creates music. His third full length, I Am Become Joy (High Two) (or, more accurately, The Lupine Chorale Society under the direction of Adam Arcuragi accompanying himself on guitar and voice present to you with song and singing: I Am Become Joy), is the super-organic product of getting a bunch of great musicians in a studio and seeing what evolves.

The Lupine Chorale Society includes members of the band These United States; New Yorker Dawn Landes; and a huge Philly posse including Tommy Bendel, Maryanne Doman, Jon Francis, Todd Starlin, Peter Wonsowski, David Hartley, and the big man himself, Brian Christinzio.

"It took a lot of energy and time to get everything coordinated, but then once we got all the pieces in place," says Arcuragi, "I really just let it do its thing."

The result is a collection of 11 songs that feels ragtag and masterful, loose but never sloppy. There's the sweet longing of "She Comes to Me" pocked with dulcimer and pedal steel. The chugging piano/banjo stomp of "People and Private Music." The upbeat dirge of "Bottom of the River," an ode to drowning.

The album's title is a play on a quote from the Hindu text The Bhagavad Gita — "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" — uttered by physicist Robert Oppenheimer upon witnessing the first nuclear bomb test.

"I joked that it was kinda like the Manhattan Project on happiness," muses Arcuragi, "where I gathered together a team of the finest musical scientists, and we hunkered down in our far-away Los Alamos. ... We were thinking about it in terms of being about — not so much joy in a skipping-down-the-road-la-di-da kind of joy — but like a real sort of earnest, heartfelt joy that you get from doing things that are supremely human."

This idea reminds Arcuragi that playing music may be, according to anthropologist Steven Mithen's book Singing Neanderthals, the first form of human communication. Which you'll be able to hear Arcuragi engage in Wednesday at North Star Bar, though he can't say how much of the Philly band he'll be getting together.

"It depends on what everyone's up to," he says in a characteristically laissez-faire fashion. "I'm hoping to get everybody on stage. ... I could end up playing solo. That'll just be up to the fortunes."

(bhoward@citypaper.net)