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Broken Baby and Friends in Long Beach: Thursday will see Broken Baby, one of the best live bands in SoCal, perform at Alex’s Bar on a bill with Jagged Baptist Club and Julez & the Rollerz.

Speaking to Broken Baby (Amber Bollinger and Alex Dezen) for a cover story in 2021, Bollinger said that: “Alex had been in a bunch of bands. He was in a band called the Damnwells for a decade or so. Then he did his solo stuff. I was wasting time being an actor. It was some friends or family who asked why we don’t just do something and be in a band together. That’s a horrible idea. So I sang backup when he needed some harmonies on his pretty songs, and then we went on tour. I was singing backup on his Alex Dezen tour, and he was sick of doing it.”

“He was like, ‘We should start a band and you should be the singer’,” she continued. “I was like, ‘That’s a dumb idea.’ But I secretly did want to do it. I wanted him to prove it. ‘What’ve you got, boy?’ He did a mockup of what our band would look like, and it was just me as a model. It was so uninteresting. But then we started listening to records that we liked, like Jesus Lizard and the Pretenders.”

Of last year’s album Late Stage Optimism, Dezen said: “I like to say that whenever anything goes wrong. It could be middle-class people unable to get loans to buy a new home, or the fact that the ketchup bottle is only filled 75 percent of the way. Chips in bags – it’s awful. So we were thinking about titles and trying to be positive, and at one point one of us said, ‘I’m so tired of being positive all the time.’ This is late stage optimism.”

Check them out in Long Beach on Thursday.

Broken Baby and Friends in Long Beach: The event takes place at 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 3 at Alex’s Bar.

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