Beau O’Reilly, 68, has been a fixture on Chicago’s fringe theater and music scenes for decades, most notably with the Curious Theatre Branch (coproducers of the annual Rhino Fest), Maestro Subgum & the Whole, and the Crooked Mouth. During the pandemic, O’Reilly recorded a new album, Thrifty (Uvulittle), that features 14 tracks created at a distance with collaborators around the country. He’s throwing a release party at Constellation on Saturday, May 15, at 8 PM.

When I was in my teens, I was in folk groups, big folk groups with lots of singers. And I was often the guy who would do the stories and introduce the songs. We played at county fairs and coffeehouses, but we were way too big really for any of that—12 or 13 people. I got introduced to Phil Ochs that way and Richard Fariña and those Village folk people who were not Bob Dylan. I learned from those guys and was very into them. Then in my early 20s, I was with this group of people that included two of my sisters and Court Dorsey, whose song [“Love Around the Corner”] I do now.

And then that band really broke up for good after a while. And there was a period of no music, really, for me. I wrote one song I think in five years during that period, after having written dozens. And then I decided I really was missing the music. So I put together the first version of the Crooked Mouth, which was called the Crooked Mouth String Band. The first incarnation, it didn’t have a drummer. Jenny came to see the band and said, “Well, the band is good, but you really need a drummer.” And she was a drummer. And so I asked Jenny to be in the band, and the Crooked Mouth has been a band now for a little over ten years. We’ll play as often as we can. We mostly play galleries and theaters and some music clubs. They’re very good musicians and really good friends. And most of us have worked together on theater pieces as well.

  • Stephanie Rearick wrote “The Hook” for Thrifty.

Stephanie Rearick did a piano track for her song [“The Hook”], and I had that piano track and I agreed to the piano track, but there was no variation possible. I couldn’t remix it or alter it very much. So I had to learn how to sing it to the track. And sometimes it was very much in the moment, and that was interesting and it was hard. I worked pretty closely with Ralph Loza, who was the engineer on that whole record. He’s pretty much a technological wonder, and he can do things that most people can’t do, or at least I can’t do.