Spain have released a newly unearthed track, “I Lied”, as a taster of their upcoming archival release, World Of Blue – watch the video below.
The album collects five previously unheard tracks from a 1994 session at Los Angeles‘s Poop Alley Studio, preceding their debut album, 1995’s The Blue Moods Of Spain.
The demos were lost for decades, and only rediscovered last year, when the tapes were baked in Florida by producer Kramer and newly mixed.
“I paid for the session with weed I grew in my closet,” explains Spain’s leader Josh Haden. “We set up and it starting raining. Tom [Grimley] put a microphone outside. For lunch, we’d walk through the alley over to India Sweets and Spices, on Fairfax just north of Pico. After tracking was finished, Petra [Haden] came over and overdubbed violin. There was a cushioned area where I remember sitting during mixdown. There were little stacks of Aphex 16-track tape everywhere.
“I first learned about the blues as a style and artform when I was a teenager, raiding my father’s record collection. One of the things I noticed that elevated the blues over other musical forms, such as punk rock, was the ability to subtly manipulate the apparent message of a song for deeper effect, for example, making a sad song happy, or vice versa. ‘I Lied’ is an attempt at this concept. It starts out as a love song but ends much differently. I love Kramer’s new production, repeating the vocal line at the end, something I’d wish I’d thought of doing back then.”
World Of Blue is released on September 30 through Shimmy-Disc/Joyful Noise.