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WINSTON TAYLOR RECORDS	TOUGH KNUCKLES
	Greek Jazz LP
DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL
SHIPPING CHARGES APPLY	He is standing across 11th Street in a topcoat when Calvin LeCompte spots him, the slope of his
	famous nose gaining pink in the December cold. “Dude! That’s that frickin’ guy from Sex and the
STORE	City!” LeCompte wheezes. “That’s the Sex and The City guy!” And sure enough, Chris Noth, bka
CONTACT	Mr. Big, towers within earshot of LeCompte, the paper clip of a 20-something responsible for the
	savant piano pop of Tough Knuckles. As the light changes, Noth looks panicked. LeCompte grins
	wide. “Shit man,” he says moments after Big whooshes by without eye contact. “I wish I’d had
	one of my records with me. I would have asked him to sign it.”
	It would not have been the first time LeCompte asked an HBO folk hero to autograph an LP.
	Weeks earlier, after a plum opening slot for Girls at Bowery Ballroom, LeCompte bumped into
	Adrian Grenier of Entourage in the downstairs bar. He bolted to the merch table to retrieve Tough
	Knuckles’ self-titled vinyl debut, a portrait of LeCompte sketched in charcoal across the front
	“’He said, ‘You don’t really want my autograph, do you man?’” LeCompte recalls. “And I was	*SOLD OUT*
	like, ‘Damn straight I don’t want your autograph. But check this out, man— it’ll make great pop
	art.’” Grenier obliged, his date for the evening blushed and LeCompte rushed to share his new
	creation with friends and strangers alike. But that one set at the Bowery, thrown together with a
	brand new band in the 48 hours following old friend Christopher Owens of Girls’ telephoned
	request, was a new beginning. Between each number, LeCompte huffed and puffed and jittered
	out fragments of a joke or idea. Little of it made sense.
	Though he’s been writing music for years, the Tough Knuckles songbook is filled with raw, loose-
	toothed pop curios that feel as impulsive as everything else LeCompte does. No filter and no
	restraint, the wingnut movements of his mind are not bound by medium either. “I actually thought
	I was done with music,” he explains. “I figured, ‘Look, Cal, you make all this music. Just make a
	record so it doesn’t exist solely as files on the Internet,” LeCompte says. “But I did make that
	first record as a swan song. I figured, ‘Fuck it. I’ll make movies. I’ve actually Googled how many
	mediums of art there are. I could be a dancer. I could choreograph dance. I could write. You just
	have to make something. I don’t like making things that become nothing.” When asked if he
	might also try to act one day, LeCompte begins to stutter. He says he's simply no good at
	pretending to be anyone but Calvin LeCompte.
	FADER (USA) 19 July 2011, Iss. 66, pg. 1, by: David Bevan, "Destiny's Child"