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Bandshes’ ‘Lost Cities’ Song Gets A Reboot For Hartford Prints Commercial

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In 2014, the Hartford trio Bandshes recorded the song “Lost Cities” on GarageBand, using only a single microphone. The song, from the album “Beautiful World,” has been streamed on Spotify more than 1.5 million times.

“Sometimes music is so produced that it loses its charm,” says singer-songwriter Zoe Chatfield. “You feel like you’re in the living room with us when you listen to it. It’s not as refined. Maybe that’s a quality that people enjoy with current music.”

The group — Chatfield, vocalist/violinist Emily Gregonis and pianist Athena Demaille — formed in the summer of 2013, after the three women graduated from the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts.

Soon enrolled at different colleges, they converged in March 2014 in a friend’s living room to record a few songs, including “Lost Cities.” It’s a song with a resigned, world-weary sensibility, sung in a low register, with no production effects, in a slow triple meter and with minimal piano accompaniment.

“Lost cities, what a pity / all these years spent building / on a love so flimsy, so unreal,” sings Chatfield. At the chorus, Gregonis adds harmony vocals a third above: “Til death, til death, til death do we part / til death, til death, til the death of this love.”

“We weren’t really expecting much,” Chatfield says. “I didn’t actually want to perform it because it was a personal thing to me. If I had been more stubborn and chosen not to perform ‘Lost Cities,’ none of these things would have happened.”

Bandshes posted the song to Bandcamp, adding the tag #reginaspektor (Spektor is a vocalist and pianist). A person charged with finding music for “Unfriended,” an independent horror film, searched for a song that sounded like Spektor, heard “Lost Cities,” and asked to license it. Universal picked up the film, which was released in 2015.

The Bandshes, left to right: Athena Demaille, Zoe Chatfield, Emily Gregonis.
The Bandshes, left to right: Athena Demaille, Zoe Chatfield, Emily Gregonis.

Streaming numbers shot up, and Bandshes’ fanbase started to grow. The band was caught off guard.

“For us, it was a scramble,” Chatfield says. “We thought, ‘Maybe we should take this seriously.’ … We tried to be more attentive on social media.”

Chatfield and Demaille live in the Hartford area; Gregonis lives in New York. Last summer, Bandshes played a series of regional shows, and they’re working on a new EP. One song (the somber, emotive, charming “Once You Go”) is already on Bandcamp.

Meanwhile, “Lost Cities” is getting a reboot: Hartford Prints, a Pratt Street shop with deep local roots and pride, uses a rewritten, re-recorded version in a new commercial, shot by filmmaker and Hartford native Pedro Bermudez.

“For me, one of the ironies is you’ve got that much attention, but it’s not until we recorded this new version that they’ve had something that did justice to the quality of the song,” Bermudez says.

Hartford Prints is owned by the Gale sisters: Addy, Callie and Rory, who married Bermudez in October. The 60-second spot launched the day before Thanksgiving, on all of the shop’s social media accounts, and possibly on a local television station. It’s the store’s third seasonal commercial in three years.

Hartford Prints sells clothing, stationery, jewelry and various other items, handprinted with Hartford-centric images (the skyline) and slogans: “Small State Big Heart,” “Steady Habits USA,” “Hartbeat,” and so on.

The commercial opens with a young woman in a Hartford shirt, strolling in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as “Lost Cities” plays. She passes a smiling woman in a red “Small State Big Heart” T-shirt, to the lyrics, “Go back home already, you’re halfway there / the buildings are calling but you’re still here.”

She boards a train leaving NYC, where a seated man sports a “New York New Haven Hartford” shirt. They exchange a smile. A voiceover: “Wherever you are this holiday season, keep home in your heart. Hartford Prints: handmade and homegrown goods.”

“It’s an opportunity for us to tell our story, spread the brand and really celebrate the season,” Rory Gale says. “A lot of the work we do is about cultivating pride, if you live here in Hartford. When you move away, you want to have a piece of home with you no matter where you are.”

“Everyone was really excited about what was being created and about the collaboration,” Bermudez says. “I don’t think there’s anything else happening in Hartford like this. For Rory, with everything that she cares about and her brand represents, those types of collaborations are important.”

Bandshes recorded the revised version of “Lost Cities” at Massive Productions, a Rocky Hill studio owned by Matt Berky. The production values — intimate, close-knit, dry — remain, though the audio quality is significantly improved.

For the chorus, Chatfield changed the lyrics from “Til death, til death, til death do we part” to “For love, for love, for love we depart.”

“Having to change the words for something and convey meaning in that same framework was challenging,” Chatfield says. “You have a limited space to say what you need to say. I wasn’t going to change the melody or do any of that. It was another thing that made it fun. It was another constraint to work in, which for writers can be fun.”

The commercial project, Chatfield adds, “is just one example of all the kinds of collaboration that could happen [in Hartford]. There’s so much space for small business and artists to produce things that will help instill pride in the community.”