Life of Luxury: Creating pop
By Kerry Purcell/ Meet the Band
Boston Herald Features Reporter
Friday, April 6, 2007 - Updated: 02:00 PM EST

The bright side of breaking up with three women in two years?
Inspiration.

“For an instant album, just add misery,” said the Luxury’s singer, Jason Dunn. “You get dumped and write a record.”
Dunn wrote 11 tunes for the Luxury’s debut album, “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,”and his thrice-broken heart deserves co-credit for most of them.
The tracks combine Dunn’s downhearted lyrics with British-style pop rock. Sitting around a table at Herrell’s ice cream parlor in Allston, Dunn reflected on his love for pop music and noted that he has a dark outlook on things.

In the summer of 2005, Dunn and drummer Steve Foster took a brief hiatus from the live music scene and recorded each track into Dunn’s computer without using amplifiers. When the other three members joined the band that fall, they used the same recording method.
“If you know what you’re doing with computer software, you don’t need amps,” Dunn said. “When you plug the guitar into the computer, you have the pure tone of the guitar, and then we can decide what kind of amp sound we want to give it. We can always change it.”
The band has files and files of instrumental and vocal tracks available, which they’re only too glad to share with fans. Check out “nice things” on the band’s Web site (www.theluxuryband.com) and simply send the guys an e-mail saying what song you want to mess with and they’ll send you what you need to make your own remix.
“That was the best idea we had,” Dunn said. “All these massively talented people and bands (Hooray for Earth, Alive With Pleasure, Funf) got behind mixing boards with our stuff. They could chop it and make it whatever they wanted.”

- kapurcell@heraldinteractive.com