Search - Mr. Flannery And His Feelings :: Try Your Hardest

''Try Your Hardest,'' Mr. Flannery's first album as a frontman and debut for Rhyme & Reason Records, is a repository of everything he's learned in a lifetime spent spent on the creative edge of show business. The songs on the set reflect the breadth of his taste: he here pulls effortlessly and with equal confidence from new wave, punk, island music, reflective acoustic singer-songwriters of the '70s, exuberant electro-funk acts of the '80s, and the willfully obscure and quietly confrontational college rock of the 1990s. This is an album wide enough to include the overdriven, swaggering glam-rock stomp of ''NYCCITY,'' the ruminative reggae of ''Embers of Dead Fires,'' and the anxious Cars-like party-starter ''Dance Of Love''--all unified by Mr. Flannery's personality, vision, and distinctive sense of humor, too. Mr. Flannery is a guitarist, producer and songwriter for Little T & One Track Mike, an alternative hip-hop act that collaborated with Slick Rick, toured with Outkast, Blink 182, Green Day, Ben Kweller and My Morning Jacket and had the MTV hit ''Shaniqua.'' His producer credits include Somi, Alicia Keys, the Chamber Band, Sara Hallie Richardson and Tris McCall. And finally as half of the Flannery Brothers, he's released three albums of award-winning and critically acclaimed children's music.