The Television Watcher

Released on September 25th, ‘I Was Shot in the Heart!’ is the debut album from The Male Pattern, a project by Will Schwartz (he/him), a songwriter, novelist, and English professor from Queens, NY. He began making music in the early 2010s as a co-songwriter/vocalist in Uncles with Daniel Bateman (who appears on this album) and Tom White of Frog before issuing one solo EP via Monkfish Records.

Schwartz then shifted his focus to fiction writing, and his work has been published in Newtown Literary, Ninth Letter, The Baltimore Review, and The Briar Cliff Review, from which he received the 2017 award for literary fiction.

His first musical work in over a decade, ‘I Was Shot in the Heart!’ is a character-driven, narrative work that explores and exploits Americana tropes to capture its time and place. It’s a concept album in the tradition of Darren Hayman’s ‘Pram Town’ (dubbed a “Folk Opera”), Terry Allen’s ‘Lubbock (On Everything),’ and Alex Cameron’s ‘Forced Witness.’

It’s a funny, intelligent, and violent album that shows Schwartz relishing writing a different kind of fiction, which is ugly, weird, unworkshopped, and most importantly, free of the constraints of academia and publisher appeasement.

The singles, “I’m a Soldier” and “Charlie (The Robbery)” will be released on August 14th and September 4th, respectively.