The Silly Pillows
American indie pop band
The Silly Pillows were an American indie pop band formed by Jonathan Caws-Elwitt. They began as a home-recorded duo of Jonathan and his wife Hilary Caws-Elwitt, sharing tapes through the cassette underground. In the 1990s the band evolved into a studio-recorded full lineup, which dissolved in 2000. From 2005 to 2008, Jonathan and Hilary revived their home-recording career as "The Original Silly Pillows."
History
In the early 1980s, Jonathan had been part of punk/psych/experimental group The Killer Asparagus (in the Boston area) and punk pop band The Degrads (in Rochester, NY, along with his brother Sam Elwitt). Jonathan started recording cassettes at home in 1984, and in 1986 he asked his wife Hilary Caws-Elwitt to join him on vocals, with the duo recording as the Silly Pillows.
The first Silly Pillows recordings were circulated on cassette through the growing network of home tapers, spurred by positive reviews in the magazines Option and Sound Choice (who said that "their whole catalog is essential listening"). In 1992, Hilary decided to stop singing, but by then their cassettes had attracted some attention in Europe. The tracks on the Silly Pillows' first vinyl release, "When She Gets Home," were home-recorded. In 1993, Jonathan assembled a group of friends for the Silly Pillows' first studio recordings, which were released as the "Equilibrium" EP on Norway's Perfect Pop label. The first studio lineup included Jonathan, Sam, Cheryl De Luke, and Christopher Earl of Squires of the Subterrain.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Silly Pillows” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.