The Silly Pillows

The indie pop ensemble the Silly Pillows traces its origins to Friendsville, Pennsylvania, where singer/songwriter Jonathan Caws-Elwitt established the project in 1986 as a home recording effort. After his wife Hillary joined on vocals, the pair put out the first of several cassettes via their own Pillow Image Ltd. label. Hillary exited the Silly Pillows in 1992 at roughly the same moment the German imprint Hoppel di Hoy released the EP When She Gets Home, a set that incorporated keyboard work by Dan Fioretti. Jonathan’s brother Sam Elwitt on guitar, singer Cheryl De Luke, and drummer Christopher Earl rounded out the configuration for the 1994 EP Equilibrium. The Silly Pillows’ debut full-length release, Strangest of the Strange, juxtaposed fresh studio cuts with prior home demos that drew on input from assorted family members and friends. Up in the Air appeared in 1995 and likewise gathered material recorded across the prior three years, while the 1996 track “I Liked It--What Was It?,” featured on one side of a split single with Citrus, climbed to number three on the Japanese pop charts. A later Pillow Image Ltd. collection pulled together still more tracks from the earliest home sessions, and just months afterward Out of Our Depth assembled additional new recordings in the same manner as 1998’s New Affections.