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Photo by Dorothy Hong

Twenty-nine-year-old musician Big Phony, aka Bobby Choy, fidgets in front of our recorder in a Lower East Side cafe.

“I can’t stand listening to myself,” the New Yorker confesses, which puts him in opposition with his fans; Choy’s progressively folksy Iron-&-Wine-meets-Death-Cab-for-Cutie-meets-Elliot-Smith sound has garnered him a fan base stretching from New York to Los Angeles, the two cities he divides his time between.

Big Phony’s music career started in sixth grade with sibling rivalry. “My mom bought my older brother a guitar,” Choy recalls. “He made it clear to me that I couldn’t touch it, and if I did he would kick my ass.” Choy started strumming the strings in secrecy “in hopes that I would get better than him,” he explains. “And one day I did, and my mom realized it. She took the guitar away from him and gave it to me.”

The guitar provided stability during a turbulent childhood. “I started writing songs in high school because I didn’t have any friends,” Choy confesses. “I’d moved something like 20 times by high school, and [in that situation] you kind of gave up on trying to make friends.” Choy fidgets. Through the course of the interview, his uneasy-with-himself demeanor brings Holden Caulfield to mind, fitting since the name Big Phony is taken from a recurring line in J.D. Salinger’s book.

Choy enjoyed playing and began performing in college—“open mics, coffeehouses, churches”—and though he got a good response, he never considered songwriting and performing anything more than a hobby. But a particularly bad post-college job changed his mind: “I was working as a bankruptcy law clerk—it was god-awful—so that was what drove me to pursue music. It was scary, I wiped out my savings.”

Luckily he had familial support; the same brother who’d banned the use of his guitar years earlier now gave him a loan to help finance Smoking Kills, Big Phony’s debut CD. Following its success, Choy is currently at work on his second, due by the end of this year. Until it arrives, Los Angelenos can find Big Phony at Hotel Cafe, while New Yorkers can see him at Pianos and the Living Room, his regular gigs; those in-between can find him on iTunes.

Check out Big Phony’s music at Myspace.