Princeton is a band from Santa Monica, CA who released their debut EP Bloomsbury this summer. The four-song disk is – as they explain – “based on the lives of four members of the influential Bloomsbury intellectual collective of the early 20th century. The songs are about Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey.” The whole disk can be streamed from their Myspace page (and available for a mere four bucks from iTunes). It’s fun stuff, bound to appeal to the bibliophilic: clever, catchy, lush and literate. They remind me of Vampire Weekend (with whom they’ve performed), but fans of the equally bookish Belle and Sebastian or The Decemberists should enjoy. This is from their song “Leonard Wolff”:
Leonard Woolf is on my bed, Those dusty pages no one read
And all the while she writes and writes, he prints the books she flies the kites
I wonder how this weighs on me, Should I fly or print my dreams?
Should I stay or maybe cry? If life is moving why should I?