About

The Simple Carnival is an orchestral pop recording project created by a guy named Jeff Boller.

This is Jeff over here to the right.

Photo by Pam Neill

Packed with soaring melodies and colorful instrumentation, The Simple Carnival aims to provide perky, darkly humorous, and mildly trippy songs you'll be humming throughout the day.

What does The Simple Carnival sound like?

Well, if the Beach Boys and Harry Nilsson collaborated on Sesame Street... Or if Burt Bacharach wrote songs for Electric Light Orchestra... Or if Billy Joel partied with Esquivel... Or... heck, just go to the Music page and listen for yourself!

While The Simple Carnival appears to sound like a band with orchestral embellishments, all the parts are actually performed by one guy. Jeff sings, writes songs, and plays piano, guitar, bass, drums, flute, and a bunch of other toys. In addition to playing all the parts on The Simple Carnival's recordings, he's built some of the instruments too. These projects are described in detail on the Songs and Sonics blog.

The Simple Carnival made its web debut in 2001, steadily gaining fans by posting songs that featured Jeff's Beach Boys-inspired, multitracked singing.

Four years later, a debut EP, Menlo Park, was released, which inexplicably had hardly any singing at all.

An odds-and-ends collection of web site and previously unreleased recordings, Sonic Rescue League Vol. 1, quietly surfaced in 2006.

In fact, it surfaced so quietly that Jeff's parents are still unaware of its existence.

Fast forward to 2008. Two years of constant writing and recording results in not one, but two releases -- and they're the most focused Simple Carnival releases to date. Not only is there a lot of singing, but they're both in hi-fi stereo!

Currently available is the Me and My Arrow EP. It's four vibrant tracks of multitracked pop bliss. And yes, the title track is a cover of the Harry Nilsson classic.

On October 1st 2008, the Girls Aliens Food album -- yes, you read right, an honest-to-goodness full-length debut ALBUM -- will be released.

And Jeff's parents will know about it.

Want to know more? Check out the FAQ!