The Thin Man

CabaretAmericana vocalist/songwriter Kennedy Greenrod relocated from Britain to California in age 17. In his early twenties, after stints in Bay Region rock clothes like Erasergun as well as the Vulvettes, he obtained an accordion, transferred to Chicago, and assumed the pseudonym the Thin Guy. Greenrod set up a collective of a number of the Windy City’s even more eclectic music artists — Jessica Billey (Smog), Tim McConville (We Ragazzi), and John Stanton (Martian Electric powered) — to record his debut, A Cloud in Trousers. The record was popular with critics and regional audiences, producing a flurry of sold-out displays with performers as different as Andrew Parrot, the Blacks, and Jim Light. In 2004 he released H.M.S. Mondegreen on Epidermis and Bones Information, a sinister and sparse assortment of waltzes and dirges laced with country-soul that echoes the functions of Tom Waits and Johnny Money.