New Order have released a brand new standalone single, their first new track since 2015’s Music Complete.
Listen to "Be A Rebel" below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6E6ugW7TOo
“In tough times we wanted to reach out with a new song," says Bernard Sumner. "We can’t play live for a ...
New Order have released a brand new standalone single, their first new track since 2015’s Music Complete.
Listen to “Be A Rebel” below:
“In tough times we wanted to reach out with a new song,” says Bernard Sumner. “We can’t play live for a while, but music is still something we can all share together. We hope you enjoy it… until we meet again.”
The single is available digitally now and will be followed by 12”, CD and a digital bundle, featuring remixes.
THE UNITY TOUR NORTH AMERICA 2021
*co-headline with Pet Shop Boys
18 Sep – Toronto, ON – Budweiser Stage*
20 Sep – Boston, MA – Rockland Trust Bank Pavilion*
22 Sep – New York, NY – Madison Square Garden*
25 Sep – Philadelphia, PA – TD Pavilion at the Mann*
28 Sep – Columbia, MD – Merriweather Post Pavilion*
1 Oct – Chicago, IL – Huntington Bank Pavilion*
3 Oct – Minneapolis, MN – The Armory*
7 Oct – Vancouver, BC – Pepsi Live at Rogers Arena*
9 Oct – George, WA – Gorge Amphitheatre*
13 Oct – San Francisco, CA – Chase Center*
15 Oct – Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Bowl*
16 Oct – Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Bowl*
SPECIAL ONE-OFF LONDON HEADLINE SHOW
6 Nov – London, UK – The O2
He claimed he’d been bitten by a rare spider while travelling in Italy. The venom supposedly left Jason Molina, the guiding spirit behind Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co, bedridden and weak for months on end, confined to the London home he shared with his wife. His condition confounded doctor...
He claimed he’d been bitten by a rare spider while travelling in Italy. The venom supposedly left Jason Molina, the guiding spirit behind Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co, bedridden and weak for months on end, confined to the London home he shared with his wife. His condition confounded doctors and made most creative endeavours – touring and recording in particular – all but impossible. That was the story Molina told several people in the late 2000s, after he had moved to London with his wife, possibly to explain a long drought of new music and live dates. But Molina always had a gift for muddying the truth with invented mythologies, for spinning tall tales about himself and his music. Was that obscure arachnid even real? Might it be some combination of fact and fabrication?
There is some suspicion that he was trying to explain away the physical ailments brought on by alcoholism; by the time he relocated to England, he was already in the throes of addiction, which had scuttled a planned tour with his friend and collaborator Will Johnson. He was drinking heavily, hiding it from his friends and perhaps inventing wild stories to deflect scrutiny. He had found the time to record a new Magnolia Electric Co album, Josephine, back in Chicago and tour briefly with his band, but most days were spent holed up in his flat drinking and writing songs when he could. He would spend the next few years struggling with alcoholism, entering and abandoning several rehab facilities before dying in March 2013. Just like the black dog calling at Nick Drake’s door, Molina’s spider becomes a grim metaphor for addiction and depression.
During those dark days in London, Molina booked one of his final recording sessions, the results of which have been fashioned into a new posthumous album, Eight Gates. The title is a bit of lore picked up on one of his many rambles around the city: the London Wall had seven points of entry into the city, but Molina invented an eighth gate, one only he knew about, more metaphysical than historical – his own personal entrance into some strange version of the place. The opportunity to record these new songs came about mostly by happenstance. Greg Norman, an engineer at Electrical Audio back in Chicago, had booked a flight to London for another recording session, but that project fell through. He contacted Molina, with whom he’d worked closely on Josephine, and together they brainstormed a few ideas before booking time at New Air Studios, owned by producer John Reynolds (Sinéad O’Connor, Damien Dempsey).
The key to everything was minimalism. There were only a handful of people in the studio, including Molina, Norman and multi-instrumentalist Chris Cacavas (Green on Red, The Dream Syndicate). Occasionally a local musician arrived to add deep cello rumblings or sympathetic violin swirls. Molina’s songwriting was similarly spare. He’d been a wordy lyricist since his early days with Songs: Ohia, eschewing verse-chorus-verse for what sounded like lengthy poems set to music. The songs on Eight Gates, whether by artistic intention or physical necessity, are short, with few words and rarely surpassing two minutes in length. Arrangements are bare, like winter trees with no leaves; even Cacavas’s contributions gesture to absence and silence. Eight Gates (or this version of it anyway, constructed more than a decade later) suggests that at the very least Molina was tinkering with new approaches to constructing songs and at the very most was entering a new phase in his creative career.
The result is an album that is fleeting, elliptical and elusive, containing nine songs and clocking in at a mere 25 minutes. On the surface it might appear slight, insubstantial, possibly even the work of an artist not completely committed to the project. Especially after the rambling country-rock songs of Josephine, which was explicitly an examination of his marriage and an apology of sorts to his wife, songs like opener “Whisper Away” and closer “The Crossroad + The Emptiness” sound refreshing in their mystery. What Molina alludes to on this album is just as powerful as what he makes explicit.
Take “Old Worry”, the album’s wounded heart. After a sharp introductory strum of his acoustic guitar, which sounds like a sad fanfare, Molina sings an aching blues as cello and organ commiserate. “Old worry, nearer to emptiness,” Molina sings. “What once was once your true name now is lost.” More than half the song is given over to him singing the title balefully, his voice like a coyote’s cry. He makes it easy to reach for poetic language to describe his music, partly because he trafficked in such imagery himself, but the effects of addiction hardly reveal themselves in his performances. As “Old Worry” ends, Molina sings that title over and over again, each time letting the syllables trail off in subtly different directions. The effect is mesmerising: the sound of an artist fixing your gaze and not letting you break eye contact.
Even during some of his darkest days, Molina remained a commanding singer, his voice rising and falling to convey private worries and dulled hopes. He’s forceful on “Fire On The Rail”, which begins with just him alone – no guitar, no accompaniment. His voice is insistent, like he’s raising the alarm in warning of some impending disaster that will strike not just himself but all of us: a flood, a storm, a plague of locusts.
But some of the most affecting moments on Eight Gates occur when he seems to step away from the microphone to deliver what might be best described as a parenthetical aside. He hums quietly to himself on “Be Told The Truth”, as though we’re catching him in an unguarded moment. On “She Says” he moans softly between lines, dejected and alone.
These songs manage to foreground Molina’s vocals and restore something very physical to his voice. There are a few brief snippets of studio chatter included: odd remarks by Molina that reinforce Eight Gates as a studio album with its seams showing. “The perfect take,” he announces at the start of “She Says”, “is just as long as the person singing is still alive. That’s really it. Are you ready here? Roll me for a few minutes here. See what I get.” A throwaway comment, it sounds like complete nonsense on first listen: perhaps chilling in the wake of his death just a few years later, but redundant given his preference for first takes and his disdain for rehearsals.
But there’s hard wisdom in those words, which hit almost as hard as his lyrics. Such asides have a very particular power on this record: they flesh out the ghost we’ve been imagining since he died in 2013. Eight Gates presents him as a living human being, troubled and troublesome, which might seem like a minor accomplishment but is actually closer to profound given what we know of his life after these sessions. Most of all, it reinforces Molina as an artist rather than as someone overtaken by demons, as a flawed man rather than the myth he often made himself out to be.
Roy Ayers is one of those musicians who falls between the worlds of jazz and R&B, which means that it has often been easy for jazz critics to ignore him. The late Richard Cook, in his usually reliable Jazz Encyclopedia, sniffily dismisses him as “a supreme example of a minor talent which has succe...
Roy Ayers is one of those musicians who falls between the worlds of jazz and R&B, which means that it has often been easy for jazz critics to ignore him. The late Richard Cook, in his usually reliable Jazz Encyclopedia, sniffily dismisses him as “a supreme example of a minor talent which has succeeded far beyond its relatively modest means”. He was never as flamboyant or inventive a vibes player as, say, Lionel Hampton or Gary Burton – his skill was as a bandleader and a populariser, someone who was able to move into R&B more comfortably than most of his jazz peers.
Quite a few jazz men of his vintage got on board with funk, but Ayers was one of the few who could ride the changes as funk mutated into disco. It means his canon has a timeless quality: he has become one of the most sampled artists on earth, his music chiming with generations of hip-hop fans; a perpetual hero to every generation who rediscovers jazz – from Guru’s Jazzmatazz to 4Hero, from Ronny Jordan to Tyler The Creator.
Although he started in bebop, Ayers’ most famous albums in the 1970s saw him working closely with R&B sessionmen like Edwin Birdsong, Philip Woo or Harry Whitaker. This latest project, recorded with A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad and composer and arranger Adrian Younge, fits neatly into this tradition. Both busy artists in their own light, Muhammad and Younge have worked together for a while, most notably on the soundtrack to Marvel’s TV series Luke Cage, as well as making cinematic soul as a duo called The Midnight Hour. Younge’s epic, orchestral settings for the likes of Jay-Z, the Wu-Tang Clan, Kendrick Lamar and Talib Kweli have become a highlight of hip-hop over the last decade, and his blaxploitation soundtracks such as Black Dynamite show him to be a master of pastiche.
This album is part of the Jazz Is Dead series, in which Younge and Muhammad team up with many of their 1970s heroes – including saxophonist Gary Bartz, pianist Doug Carn, flautist Brian Jackson, along with Brazilians João Donato, Marcos Valle and Azymuth. In recent years, all of these veterans have taken part in an LA concert series, Arts Don’t Sleep, after which they decamped to Younge’s Linear Labs studio to turn jams and new ideas into brand new grooves. You get the impression that Younge and Muhammad (keyboards and bass guitars) are trying to recreate snippets of beloved ’70s jazz-funk records by these artists – back-engineering the kind of rarity that would be sampled by an enterprising hip-hop DJ. There is lots of riffing over simple chords played on a Fender Rhodes, wiry and hypnotic bass guitar lines, and some monophonic analogue synth sounds. As well as a chorus of female singers (including co-writers Elgin Clark and Anitra Castleberry), there are a few solos played by trombonist Phil Ranelin and tenor saxophonist Wendell Harrison (both key figures from the early-’70s Detroit label Tribe Records).
A lot of the tracks reference Roy Ayers’ most revered singles. The opening track, “Synchronize Vibration”, shares the same tempo, ambiguous chords, heavenly strings, soaring Mellotron and summery lyrics as “Everybody Loves The Sunshine”. “Sunflower” is a midtempo, one-chord jam that resembles Ayers’ 1976 hit “Searching”; the final track “African Sounds” is a deliberate nod to his Afrocentric anthems like “Red Black & Green”, “Pretty Brown Skin” or “Africa, Center Of The World”.
This is an all-American band, but there are nods to the rhythmic sophistication coming out of London’s jazz scene. Drummer Greg Paul has worked closely with Brit-jazzer Kamaal Williams, aka Henry Wu, and flits between funk, Caribbean and West African patterns with ease. On “Soulful And Unique” you hear him “slugging” like a slightly wonky J Dilla sample; on “Gravity” he goes into a polyrhythmic Afrobeat pattern typical of Ayers’ old pals Fela Kuti and Tony Allen.
Ayers himself, in his 80th year when this was recorded in February 2019, takes a back seat, happy to provide colour and texture. On “Solace”, one of the faster grooves, based around a single chord groove and an urgent punk-funk bassline, Ayers’ vibes have a calming quality, as if altering the boundaries of time and space. It’s the sound of soul music melting under a hot summer sun – an eternal quality of his best music.
Once Were Brothers, the new film documentary about The Band inspired by Robbie Robertson's memoir, is out today on DVD, Blu-Ray and streaming services.
The film features rare, archival footage and interviews with many of Robertson’s friends and collaborators including Bob Dylan, George Harrison...
Once Were Brothers, the new film documentary about The Band inspired by Robbie Robertson’s memoir, is out today on DVD, Blu-Ray and streaming services.
The film features rare, archival footage and interviews with many of Robertson’s friends and collaborators including Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel, Martin Scorsese and Taj Mahal – several of whom can be seen in the exclusive clip below:
To win one of three copies of Once Were Brothers on DVD, simply answer the following question.
In which American state is the pink house where The Band conceived Music From Big Pink?
a) New York
b) New Jersey
c) New Hampshire
Email your answer – along with your name and address – to competitions@www.uncut.co.uk by Thursday, September 10. A winner will be chosen by the Uncut team from the correct entries. The editor’s decision is final.
Meeting your heroes can be disappointing. As you’ll read in our new Ultimate Music Guide, when Melody Maker’s Steve Sutherland travelled to meet the Grateful Dead in California, it was nothing of the kind. On his visit to the band’s HQ in San Rafael in 1989, he found not only an engaged and bu...
Meeting your heroes can be disappointing. As you’ll read in our new Ultimate Music Guide, when Melody Maker’s Steve Sutherland travelled to meet the Grateful Dead in California, it was nothing of the kind. On his visit to the band’s HQ in San Rafael in 1989, he found not only an engaged and businesslike organisation – playing benefits for AIDS and environmental awareness; running their own ticketing operation – but also a generational icon who retained all of his lustre.
Back from the clutches of drug addiction, fresh from the success of the band’s In The Dark album and its breakout single “Touch Of Grey”, working on new music and a new album – this, in customarily voluble form, was Jerry Garcia. Ready and willing to talk about psychedelic adventures past, film projects future and Bob Dylan’s dog situation (present), the guitarist was a twinkling and avuncular host.
It’s now 25 years since Garcia’s death (we’re a month or so after what would have been his 78th birthday), but his presence beams from the archive interviews and the music we give detailed attention to in this new publication. Always old heads on young shoulders, the band he led had lived a life on a tightrope between musical scholarship and chemical-sociological change before they even recorded their debut album.
If it was hard for them to fit in the sum of their experience into that debut, it was a struggle which informed and energised rather than troubled the band from that point on. The next 30 years were spent chasing something down in their music, which blossomed ever outward. Their releases span official live albums like the superb Live/Dead or Skull & Roses. There are great studio records like Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both now 50 years old. And all this ran parallel to an unofficial history of live recordings, all – with some foresight – permitted by the band.
The band saw themselves as fingers on a hand, which you might see guiding the music along its way, a journey which may not be completely done. As Bob Weir tells us in his exclusive introduction to this issue, he doesn’t only think about what Grateful Dead music has done so far, but also about what’s next, “where it wants to go…”
Presenting the Ultimate Music Guide to one of the world’s most pioneering and historic bands: the Grateful Dead. From the dawn of expanded consciousness with Ken Kesey’s “acid tests” all the way to their huge hit “Touch Of Grey” and beyond – what a long, strange trip it’s been…
...
Presenting the Ultimate Music Guide to one of the world’s most pioneering and historic bands: the Grateful Dead. From the dawn of expanded consciousness with Ken Kesey’s “acid tests” all the way to their huge hit “Touch Of Grey” and beyond – what a long, strange trip it’s been…
Featuring an exclusive introduction by Bob Weir: “My spine became electric, it was no longer matter…” Bob tells us what it was really like to be on stage during “Dark Star”. Plus a series of new interviews in which a cast of band members, producers and workingmen (and women) recall for us just how far the band travelled in their remarkable 1970.
For its 50th anniversary in November, David Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World album will be reissued under its original working title, Metrobolist.
First released in the US in November 1970, the album's name was changed at the last minute to The Man Who Sold The World – the original stereo mas...
For its 50th anniversary in November, David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World album will be reissued under its original working title, Metrobolist.
First released in the US in November 1970, the album’s name was changed at the last minute to The Man Who Sold The World – the original stereo master tapes were in fact labelled Metrobolist, with the title ultimately crossed out.
The Metrobolist 50th anniversary artwork has been created by Mike Weller who was behind the originally intended album artwork which Mercury refused to release (although the US sleeve was based on his design). The gatefold sleeve also features many images from the infamous Keith MacMillan Mr Fish ‘dress’ shoot at Haddon Hall used on the cover of the The Man Who Sold The World when it was released in the rest of the world in spring of 1971.
Speaking in 2000, Bowie said of the sleeve imagery: “Mick Weller devised this kind of very subversive looking cartoon and put in some quite personalised things. The building in the background on the cartoon in fact was the hospital where my half brother had committed himself to. So for me, it had lots of personal resonance about it.”
The 2020 rerelease has been remixed by original producer Tony Visconti, with the exception of “After All” which is featured in its 2015 remaster incarnation. As well as a 180g black vinyl edition, Metrobolist will come in 2020 limited edition handwritten numbered copies on gold vinyl and on white vinyl, all randomly distributed.
The remixed album will also be available for streaming and high-resolution download.
Nick Cave's Idiot Prayer solo piano film – hailed in the latest issue of Uncut as "raising the bar for isolation performance" when it was livestreamed back in July – will be released in cinemas from November 5. The extended cinema cut contains four additional performances not included in the ori...
Nick Cave’s Idiot Prayer solo piano film – hailed in the latest issue of Uncut as “raising the bar for isolation performance” when it was livestreamed back in July – will be released in cinemas from November 5. The extended cinema cut contains four additional performances not included in the original livestream.
Idiot Prayer will also be released on CD, LP and streaming services on November 22.
Watch Cave’s Idiot Prayer version of Ghosteen’s “Galleon Ship” below:
You can pre-order the album and sign up for updates on the cinema release here. Read Uncut’s full review of Idiot Prayer in the latest issue, which you can purchase by clicking here.
Wilco's 1999 album Summerteeth gets the deluxe edition treatment from Rhino on November 6.
The 4xCD set includes a Bob Ludwig 2020 remastered version of the original album, along with an entire disc of unreleased studio outtakes, alternate versions and demos. Hear “Summer Teeth (Slow Rhodes Ver...
Wilco’s 1999 album Summerteeth gets the deluxe edition treatment from Rhino on November 6.
The 4xCD set includes a Bob Ludwig 2020 remastered version of the original album, along with an entire disc of unreleased studio outtakes, alternate versions and demos. Hear “Summer Teeth (Slow Rhodes Version)” below:
The two remaining discs in the CD version feature a previously unissued concert recording from the Summerteeth tour, captured on November 1 1999 at The Boulder Theatre in Colorado.
The limited-edition 5xLP version of will feature the remastered studio album, as well as the unreleased demos, alternates and outtake recordings, pressed on 180-gram vinyl. However, instead of the Colorado concert included in the CD package, the LP version contains a special, exclusive performance from early 1999 titled An Unmitigated Disaster – a previously unreleased live in-store set at Tower Records on March 11, 1999, recorded just two days after the album was released and originally broadcast on Chicago radio station WXRT-FM.
Arab Strap have announced their reunion with the release of a new single, their first in almost 15 years.
Listen to "The Turning Of Our Bones" below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4CN6sxDvr0
Says the band's Aidan Moffat: “'The Turning Of Our Bones' is an incantation, a voodoo spell to ...
Arab Strap have announced their reunion with the release of a new single, their first in almost 15 years.
Listen to “The Turning Of Our Bones” below:
Says the band’s Aidan Moffat: “’The Turning Of Our Bones’ is an incantation, a voodoo spell to raise the dead. Inspired by the Famadihana ritual of the Malagasy people of Madagascar, in which they dance with the corpses of loved ones; it’s all about resurrection and shagging.”
“The Turning Of Our Bones” will be released as a physical single (backed with 7″ exclusive track “The Jumper”) on October 23 via Rock Action.
A previously unheard Cardiacs song has been released today to mark the funeral of bandleader Tim Smith, who died in July aged 59.
Listen to "Vermin Mangle" below:
Vermin Mangle by Cardiacs
A note accompanying the release reads:
Of stars and planets,
of darkness and light,
of all univer...
A previously unheard Cardiacs song has been released today to mark the funeral of bandleader Tim Smith, who died in July aged 59.
Listen to “Vermin Mangle” below:
A note accompanying the release reads:
Of stars and planets,
of darkness and light,
of all universal energies issues forth
the fragile beauty of
VERMIN MANGLE…
…a present for YOU
by way of gracious thanks
for your abiding LOVE
and LOYALTY towards,
the stellar gift that was and will forever be,
TIMOTHY CHARLES SMITH.
Send him home:
Send him near and far.
Remember him.
July 3rd, 1961 – July 22nd, 2020
Go here to read a moving funeral notice from Tim’s brother and bandmate Jim Smith and to donate to the family’s chosen charity, The Wiltshire Wildlife Hospital.
Kevin Morby has announced that his new album Sundowner will be released on October 16 via Dead Oceans.
Watch a video for lead single "Campfire" below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22Q_Ec0V2OQ
Sundowner was recorded with Brad Cook at Sonic Ranch in Texas. Morby played nearly every instrum...
Kevin Morby has announced that his new album Sundowner will be released on October 16 via Dead Oceans.
Watch a video for lead single “Campfire” below:
Sundowner was recorded with Brad Cook at Sonic Ranch in Texas. Morby played nearly every instrument on the album including lead guitar, mellotron and pump organ, with bass and some keys from Cook plus James Krivchenia on percussion.
Says Morby of the album: “It is a depiction of isolation. Of the past. Of an uncertain future. Of provisions. Of an omen. Of a dead deer. Of an icon. Of a Los Angeles themed hotel in rural Kansas. Of billowing campfires, a mermaid and a highway lined in rabbit fur. It is a depiction of the nervous feeling that comes with the sky’s proud announcement that another day will be soon coming to a close as the pink light recedes and the street lamps and house lights suddenly click on.”
Additionally, Morby has announced a virtual tour via Noon Chorus. Every Thursday starting on September 10 he’ll perform his complete discography in chronological order, culminating in a performance of Sundowner the day before the album’s release:
Sept 10 – Harlem River
Sept 17 – Still Life
Sept 24 – Singing Saw
Oct 1 – City Music
Oct 8 – Oh My God
Oct 15 – Sundowner
The new multi-format and deluxe reissues of The Rolling Stones' 1973 album Goats Head Soup are out on Friday (September 4), and the band talk extensively about the album's fraught but thrilling gestation in the current issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to order online by clicking here.
...
“We had a lot of problems by the time we made Goats Head Soup, extraneous problems in all kinds of directions,” explains Mick Jagger. “Tours – were they going to go or were they not? Would we get a visa to go to the US, or not? We couldn’t get visas at that point because of all the drug busts.”
Abandoning England in April 1971 for the South of France – “We were broke and we owed loads of money to the Inland Revenue,” says Jagger – by 1973, the Stones held ‘persona non grata’ status in several European countries. For a band who had been positioned at the start of their career as the anti-Beatles, being bad had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Strung out in Jamaica – one of the few countries left that would take them – the Stones cooked up the grimmest funk.
“We started to feel the pressure of being in exile on this album,” says Keith Richards. “When we made Exile On Main Street in France, we’d just left home and had stuff to do. We just carried on. But Goats Head Soup was the first album where we had to learn to work differently, to work apart and put songs together while actually being in exile.”
Not for the first time, The Rolling Stones demonstrated their ability to play resourcefully the cards they were dealt. This is where the Stones’ sound of the late 1970s and ’80s was born – an exotic, soulful fusion of rock and funk – but for all the gouched-out wah-wah pedals and clavinets, Goats Head Soup is still unambiguously the work of the musicians who made “Jumping Jack Flash”.
“Exile… was overwhelming in a way,” says Richards. “Because it was a double album, it was still pretty relevant when we were doing this one.”
“We spent so much time on Exile…,” adds Jagger. “This is different. A different studio, different attitude to playing. It’s done in a shorter time. All these things affect it. Maybe it was simpler, in some ways…”
Originally published in Uncut's Take 189
Long seen as perhaps the quintessential American indie band, this unassuming Hoboken, New Jersey trio have a far more fiery and fearless back catalogue than that dubious epithet would suggest. In fact, they've quietly established themselves as one of the m...
Originally published in Uncut’s Take 189
Long seen as perhaps the quintessential American indie band, this unassuming Hoboken, New Jersey trio have a far more fiery and fearless back catalogue than that dubious epithet would suggest. In fact, they’ve quietly established themselves as one of the most stunningly eclectic and experimental rock bands of the last 30 years. Producing 13 albums and countless side-projects, married couple Georgia Hubley (drums, keys and vocals) and Ira Kaplan (guitar, keys and vocals), along with bassist James McNew, have spun away from the jangly garage-rock of their mid-’80s origins to embrace the dustier corners of their enviable record collections – taking in krautrock, shoegaze, ambient, even Bacharach-esque pop and tropicália, and inspiring artists like The Flaming Lips and Graham Coxon along the way. “It all comes down to not really knowing what we were doing!”
_____________________
Ride The Tiger Coyote, 1986 The timid, compact debut, featuring Ira on what he later termed “naïve guitar”, and, in what would become a pattern for their early years, a revolving cast of bassists.
Ira Kaplan: This album feels very far away. Some things feel like yesterday; that is not one of them. It was recorded in Boston, at White Dog. I don’t think overconfidence was ever our problem – we were big fans of Mission Of Burma, and having somebody we respected as much as Clint Conley [bassist/vocalist] to sign on to produce us meant a lot. We were not anywhere close to knowing what we were doing…
Georgia Hubley: Our influences were not terribly different from now – forgetting things that came after, of course. A bit of US garage rock, ’60s folk rock, The Feelies.
Ira: I think we were happy with the album at the time, to a certain extent. There were things about it that were definitely very exciting. Dave [Schramm, lead guitarist on the album] had so much to do with it. Some of the more orchestrated, overdubbed things were ideas from him. There were definitely things we were discovering about ourselves. I think it all really comes down to not really knowing what we were doing!
James McNew: I think I heard Yo La Tengo for the first time on a college radio station in my town, Charlottesville, Virginia. Whether I would’ve heard Ride The Tiger first or [1987’s] New Wave Hot Dogs I’m not sure, but it would’ve been right around that time.
_____________________
Fakebook Bar None, 1990 After losing their bassist, Stephan Wichnewski, Ira and Georgia record a charming acoustic set mainly comprised of covers, including songs by Cat Stevens, John Cale and the Flamin’ Groovies.
Ira: There was a day on tour when Georgia was walking down the street somewhere in the mid-West and she actually overheard people laughing about the terrible radio interview that they’d just heard with us. So we thought, ‘How can we get out of this stuff?’ – so we brought a guitar to the interviews and started singing songs. It became a repertoire we developed with all these cover songs. Fakebook was trying to present that side of us – there’s a couple of songs we wrote for it, but mostly it was things we’d been doing that way already. The whole record was done very quickly, we were rehearsing in our living room at the time because we were playing so quietly we could rehearse almost anywhere. It had the advantage that Georgia wasn’t having to play drums and sing at the same time…it was a two-tiered thing: the confidence to sing and the ability and confidence to sing while playing drums. Having to do just the one definitely made it easier.
Georgia: I suppose I did [find my voice] here. Trying parts that I knew from listening to records was kind of an entry way into singing. I think I’m a lot more confident now. I’m more accepting of the imperfections, which actually makes it easier to carry on and possibly improve.
_____________________
Painful Matador, 1993 With Matador, new producer Roger Moutenot and the latest (and last) bassist James on board, the band get busy reinventing themselves as noise-rocking sonic explorers.
Ira: James is on [1992’s] May I Sing With Me, but there he’s still kind of the guy who’s filling in, we didn’t necessarily think he’d be around 12 months on.
Georgia: I think Painful is where the three of us really joined up as a single-headed monster. That’s the record where we really decided we could do whatever we wanted. It’s where we discovered that creative freedom, to do things we hadn’t done before. Then, the more successful it was, it gave us the courage to be weirder. I know when we were making Painful, though, it was kind of a rough period for us. We were changing record labels, it was a very stressful time – not making the music, but other stuff. Although it is one of my favourite records, there were a lot of challenges.
Ira: Once James moved to Brooklyn and was actually going to be in the group, our whole approach changed. There was a lot of practicing, and regular practicing, it wasn’t like ‘who’s available on Thursday night?’, it became an everyday kind of thing.
James: In the interim between May I Sing With Me and Painful, we took this organ off the shelf in the practice space – it belonged to someone else who practised there – and spent the day just playing our songs in this re-arranged lineup. We just thought ‘that’s kind of funny’ – and then realised, ‘Oh, that’s pretty good, actually!’
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Electr-O-Pura Matador, 1995 To Nashville, where the trio meet Lambchop, try the city’s famous hot chicken and jam their sound into groovier, krautrocking pastures.
Ira: We knew we needed to work with Roger again and he’d moved to Nashville. So we blocked out I-don’t-remember-how-many weeks, and we went down there and exclusively worked. I believe it was Richard Baluyut from the band Versus who told us that going to Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack was a must do…
Georgia: Hot chicken is a local, hot, spicy chicken. It’s fried chicken with a red hot chili coating but mostly it tastes like southern fried chicken – very tasty but not so good for your digestive tract!
James: We became friends with Lambchop around that time, which was great, because all of a sudden you have twenty new friends in a town you don’t know that well – the people from Lambchop were really like family, like it was a really special connection that we had.
Ira: In between Painful and Electr-O-Pura we started working with [Half Japanese’s] Jad Fair for a record, Strange But True. Jad suggested we record without any preparation. We were so intrigued by the things we were coming up with spontaneously that we thought that would make a good direction. Sometimes writing like that is easy, sometimes it’s not. The neighbours like it better.
James: I know that ‘Tom Courtenay’ began as a forty-five minute instrumental jam.
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I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One Matador, 1997 The finest embodiment of the band’s many sides: from distorted indie (“Sugarcube”) and tender ballads (“Shadows”) to bossanova (“Center Of Gravity”) and ten-minute organ grinds (“Spec Bebop”).
Ira: I think we’re aware that many other people view it [as their favourite]. We’re aware when we play we live that “Sugarcube” and “Stockholm Syndrome” and “Autumn Sweater” are getting a response. I think we were probably just more confident by this point. Everything is kind built on what came before and I think there were things that we were trying here that we hadn’t tried before. We put out an EP called “Camp Yo La Tengo” that had a [nine-minute instrumental] song called “Mr Ameche Plays The Stranger”, and I remember feeling at the time that that was a thing that we really liked that we left off of Electr-O-Pura. So there was a kind of feeling throughout the group, that ‘we’re not leaving that one off again on this album.’ We felt as strongly about those kind of songs as we did “Sugarcube” or “Stockholm Syndrome”. Things like [Beach Boys cover] “Little Honda”, which might not have been on an earlier record, were on that record.
James: It’s not as though I feel any prouder of that one than I do of anything else that we’ve done. I feel very strongly about all of it. I wish I were able to shed some light on it. Maybe, looking back, I feel that we had gained confidence in making that record. I think that we showed different sides of ourselves a little bit, showed different ways we could play, yet they were all still us, they were all our personalities, and I think maybe that’s where that became a more regular thing. I mean, I know that when we played live we would play loud and quiet, that was just who we were, and I think that that expanded quite a bit around that time in terms of showing other styles and textures. We’ve started lots of shows with “Green Arrow”… A song that’s in one space on an album is in a completely different space in a live show, and in the different contexts, the songs and the moods are very flexible for us. I think they’re open to interpretation and change. Georgia is really the best when it comes to sequencing things, and this was a great one.
Georgia: This one kind of came together pretty easily – sequencing is like a puzzle, it dictates where the songs can go. I can’t really take all the credit for it, I’m just more emphatic about what I want!
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And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out… Matador, 2000 Named after a Sun Ra lyric, this is a hushed and spooky sojourn into the dark heart of domesticity and the suburban night – once again recorded at Nashville’s Alex The Great with Roger Moutenot.
Ira: It was never part of the plan to make a quiet record. It seemed to keep happening that when we’d play loud it just wasn’t sticking, if we played quiet, it was. At the time we didn’t know why it was happening. Later, we hypothesised that it could have been the sound in our new practice space. I’ve always thought that a lot of the development of the band is confidence, and confidence to accept that, ‘OK, this may not be anything like anything we’ve done before but that’s alright.’
Georgia: I wouldn’t say we are exactly floating along in outer space, but [our ethos] is open-ended. Opportunities are often very exciting when things arise, cause you didn’t plan it.
James: [18-minute closer] “Night Falls On Hoboken” was recorded completely live. We wanted to figure out a way to properly capture what we had been doing, you know, physically, so it took us… a couple of days, I think… ‘Okay, let’s try one!’ and half an hour later, ‘Let’s try another one!’ We definitely chased it for a couple of days until we hit on the way that we could actually do it the way we were doing it, and we were really happy once we got it.
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The Sounds Of The Sounds Of Science Egon, 2002 An instrumental soundtrack to eight Surrealist nature documentaries by the eccentric French director Jean Painlevé, including “The Love Life Of The Octopus” and “Shrimp Stories”…
Georgia: It was a weird time – we made The Sounds Of The Sounds Of Science literally right after September 11. We were at a wedding in North Carolina, and we had all our equipment with us, as we were planning to head on to Nashville to record. We almost cancelled – you just want to be there when things like that happen, but it was more practical to make the record. I really loved that record, but it was very strange recording it.
Ira: We were approached by San Francisco International Film Festival about doing something. we were not familiar with Painlevé, they brought him to our attention. We got some VHS copies of some of his movies, and we thought, ‘Great, we love the movies…’, and saw how we could find our way in.
James: It was definitely another jam-oriented time. We had been playing a lot, practising a lot. We had all these jams coming into play before that project even came about. I think we sort of went through what we had and found that quite a bit of it matched up to the images. I know that the “Sea Urchins” track is actually two separate pieces of music that we had already composed, mashed into each other. Maybe there is something in an all-instrumental set that does allow us a little more room, I guess, to be freakier and looser, and more psychedelic, I don’t know. But I like how it feels.
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Condo Fucks Fuckbook Matador, 2009 A lo-fi YLT alter-ego is born – feedback-drenched garage-rockers tearing up classics by the Small Faces, The Kinks, The Beach Boys and even Slade.
Ira: This pretty much was recorded in real time! It was an accidental record. We were going to open for The A-Bones, who are friends of ours that I play with sometimes, in a small bar. We wanted to do it under a fake name, so we just came up with that repertoire and came up with that name. Meanwhile, James had got some new recording equipment and wanted to try it out so we just recorded a rehearsal and played the set from start to finish, but the recording sounded pretty good. We were ready to release it on Egon, but to our surprise Matador decided it was Matador material.
James: A lot of them were songs we had already been doing, like songs that had been in our live sets – almost all of them were song that we’d known already. I think we were really attracted to the idea of no tonal variety at all, and just everything basically sounding the same… No switching of instruments, just completely straight-ahead, like, for half an hour, no talking between songs. Yeah, that was pretty appealing. I recorded it, kind of… that was one of the first full band recordings that I ever did, and it was very easy because I certainly didn’t have to worry about level, I just pushed everything into the red and practically recorded it live.
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Fade Matador, 2012 Recorded in Chicago with a new producer, Tortoise’s John McEntire, the band’s thirteenth record is a typically varied mix of sweet harmony and unorthodox textures, dominated by its second side of woozily pretty ballads.
Georgia: The only thing we decided to do was to keep this more concise, possibly shorter. It was fun to really pare down the music and the songs and get them a little tighter and shorter. After they’re done, I do not spend a lot of time thinking about our records! I can literally be at a bar and a song can come on and it will sound oddly familiar. It’ll literally take half the song to realise!
Ira: We had a really great time with John, we’ve known him for a long time. He’s got all sorts of stuff in his studio; it’s quite a playhouse he’s put together.
James: John’s studio is amazing, it’s like a very clean spaceship. There was one thing that I became very attached to, called the Luminous Garden. It’s a box with different wires sprouting out of the top of it, with a contact mic inside the box, and various echo and filter processes built into it. It creates these amazing oscillating percussive sounds. I’m perfectly ready to forfeit every instrument in the band and do all of our songs just on this crazy instrument. And I don’t think people will enjoy it, but I know I’ll have a really good time doing it!
In 2014, Canadian songwriter Kathleen Edwards surprised everyone when she announced she was stepping back from music, moving back to her hometown and opening a coffee shop called Quitters. The name was tongue-in-cheek, in line with the self-deprecating humour found in Edwards’ music whenever thing...
In 2014, Canadian songwriter Kathleen Edwards surprised everyone when she announced she was stepping back from music, moving back to her hometown and opening a coffee shop called Quitters. The name was tongue-in-cheek, in line with the self-deprecating humour found in Edwards’ music whenever things were getting too serious. But as the years passed, and Edwards shared more about the depression that soured the release of her 2012 Polaris Prize-shortlisted masterpiece Voyageur, new music seemed increasingly unlikely.
It turns out that a break was what Edwards needed to fall back in love with songwriting. An invitation to co-write in Nashville with Maren Morris and Ian Fitchuk, fresh from his work on Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, turned into writing for herself again – and those songs became Total Freedom, her first album in eight years. Recorded partly in Nashville with Fitchuk and partly at home in Ontario with longtime collaborator Jim Bryson, its 10 tracks sing with warmth, love, gratitude and lessons learned.
“Glenfern”, named after the street where Edwards first lived with ex-husband Colin Cripps, is a breezy, nostalgic album opener and one that circles back to Voyageur, an album often misinterpreted as being about the breakdown of the couple’s marriage and Edwards’ short-lived relationship with co-producer Justin Vernon. The song is packed with loving details, both domestic and professional: touring the world and playing with their heroes, Cripps caught on Google Street View “in your slippers on the front porch with the Siamese cat”. “It’s not up there any more, but I will always be thankful for it,” Edwards sings warmly, in the same tone she applies to reminiscing about her later successes.
Edwards’ photographic memory for the little details, and ability to translate them into the perfect lyric, is one of the reasons that Failer, her 2003 debut, still resonates two decades later. Those details can charm: sleeping dogs at sunrise on “Birds On A Feeder”, the friendship at the heart of “Simple Math” that retains its magic “now we are our mothers’ ages”. But they can also devastate, whether it’s a painted rock under a catalpa tree marking the final resting place of Edwards’ beloved golden retriever, or the throwaway lines – pulled threads in sweaters, unpaid birthday dinner bills – that taken together paint a vivid picture of an emotionally abusive relationship.
Fitchuk and Bryson share co-production credits with Edwards, and together the trio combine the lush textures of her Voyageur-era sound with the roots-rock sensibility of earlier material. Lead single “Options Open” – which started out embracing the giddy new-love rush of the early days of a relationship, only to fold back and celebrate the self when that relationship went sour – has the bright, poppy bounce of Fitchuk’s work with Morris or Musgraves, but the acerbic bite of the lyrics is Edwards’ own: “I swore I wouldn’t go near you with a ten-foot pole,” she sings, “but I’m holding up a mirror, we look so sweet.” Fitchuk also oversees, and plays brooding piano on “Ashes To Ashes”, a memento mori dedicated to a Quitters customer and friend, punctuated by sombre backing vocal from Courtney Marie Andrews and an emotive banjo solo from Todd Lombardo.
Bryson, who Edwards credits with “making me feel safe” as she navigated a return to recording that coincided with her exit from the abusive relationship that casts a shadow over some of the album’s more gut-wrenching tracks, shares production credits on some of these darker songs. They include “Feelings Fade”, a “parting middle finger” recorded in one raw vocal take, haunted by Kinley Dowling’s string arrangements and Aaron Goldstein’s pedal steel; “Hard On Everyone”, on which you can hear the daily microaggressions and anxieties of abuse build and snowball until the song reaches a screaming, cathartic electric guitar avalanche; and Edwards’ “armour song” “Fool’s Ride”, on which she mocks romantic cliches, and herself, from the safety of her freedom.
But the story of this album is not of that one relationship, but of the “total freedom” of the title: freedom to watch the birds on the feeder in the garden as the sun comes up, in a life full of the love of good dogs and good people. “Birds On A Feeder” was one of the earliest songs written for the album, before the relationship that would change its meaning, here rearranged by Fitchuk from the version Edwards played him on his sofa. “Come on, spring, won’t you show yourself to me,” sings Edwards, her voice as deft as those birds in flight, as her powers reawaken.
Q&A
Kathleen Edwards on fans, friends, freedom…
What got you writing music again?
I give Maren Morris some credit for that. She reached out to say she was a fan of mine from my early records, and would I consider writing with her. I went to Nashville for a few days and did this writing session, and it ended up being the spark that I needed.
What does ‘total freedom’ mean to you?
My original working title for the album was ‘Quitsville’, but Ian pushed me away from that. It’s really funny that the title comes from the song “Birds On A Feeder”. Not long after I wrote it, I got into a relationship with someone who ended up being an emotionally abusive person. When I finally realised what I was dealing with, I did it feeling incredible gratitude: that I had the strength of self to go, and to have cultivated a life with amazing friends around me who knew something was wrong. It felt like total fucking freedom.
And yet the album is ultimately very loving.
One of the things about taking a big break from music and doing something totally different was that it gave me a chance to reflect. The last thing I wanted to do when writing a record was have it be very angry and reflective of bad memories. I don’t want to get on stage and sing about that every night! So I just put it in that lens, and it came pretty easily.
INTERVIEW: LISA-MARIE FERLA
The Blue Note legend is not based on distinctive artwork alone. Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the company’s founders, cared enough about quality to pay for rehearsal time as well as putting the musicians in a good studio with a fine engineer. Yes, they presented the results in an attractive packa...
The Blue Note legend is not based on distinctive artwork alone. Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the company’s founders, cared enough about quality to pay for rehearsal time as well as putting the musicians in a good studio with a fine engineer. Yes, they presented the results in an attractive package with a coherent label identity. But they also paid scrupulous attention to what they included on their monthly schedule. Albums were selected for release according to how they would benefit the artists’ careers as well as the company.
They also recorded more than the label could release, which meant that when they effectively ceased their activities at the end of ’60s, there would be plenty left for archivists to discover.
Sometimes – as with the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson’s Oblique – it was hard to work out why a session had not been deemed worthy of release at the time. Occasionally it was easier to understand: Grant Green’s Matador did not match the funkier direction in which the guitarist was heading; the tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks had faded into the shadows of addiction, which is why three of his five albums had to wait until after his death in 1974 to reach his small but devoted following. Someone with Brooks’ needs would have been particularly grateful for the label’s practice of recording so frequently, since Lion and Wolff paid by the session.
The principal reason the session Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers recorded in a single day in March 1959 remained unreleased for more than 60 years is obvious. Five weeks later, the same lineup recorded live at Birdland in New York City. Blakey’s bands always responded well to being taped on stage, as the three 10-inch volumes of A Night at Birdland had proved in 1954. Or perhaps it was Blakey himself whose reaction was key: his backbeats slammed harder and his press-rolls mushroomed more extravagantly in front of an audience, spurring his sidemen to new heights.
By comparison with the two volumes of At The Jazz Corner Of The World, as the Birdland recordings were titled when they were released to great acclaim later in 1959, the session now released as Just Coolin’ seems like a dry run, particularly since it wasn’t given a title or a catalogue number at the time. Of its six compositions, four appeared on the live albums, so direct comparisons are possible. The Messengers’ lineup changed frequently, for a variety of reasons, but it was a priceless graduate school for musicians from Clifford Brown to Wynton Marsalis, and Blakey always encouraged his players to bring along their own compositions. Immediately before the Just Coolin’ lineup came together, Benny Golson and Bobby Timmons had filled the repertoire with catchy items like the funky “Blues March” and the gospelly “Moanin’”. Immediately after, in would come Wayne Shorter, with more complex and unorthodox pieces like “Lester Left Town” and “Children Of The Night”. But this, in the spring of 1959, was an interim group, with Hank Mobley, a member of an earlier lineup, drafted back in to replace Golson and contributing three of his neat hard-bop tunes.
Welcoming the audience at Birdland in April, Blakey told them, “If you feel like patting your feet, pat your feet. If you feel like clapping your hands, clap your hands. And if you feel like taking off your shoes, take off your shoes. We are here to have a ball.” That’s not an easy mood to recreate in a studio, with only a handful of technicians for an audience, and although the band can still swing like mad, as they show on the up-tempo “Jimerick” (the only track whose composer remains unknown) and Mobley’s exuberant “M&M Blues”, inevitably Just Coolin’ has a more restrained air. Just as naturally, the intervening weeks have seen the compositions and arrangements evolve in different ways. Mobley’s “Hipsippy Blues” is slightly faster and crisper in the studio than the more relaxed and expansive subsequent live version, while the modal intro to the standard “Close Your Eyes” benefits in its later treatment from a nifty passage of cross-rhythms.
That’s not to say the studio session – one of the last to be recorded in engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s original studio, set up in his parents’ house – is substandard. Any chance to hear more of the extraordinary Lee Morgan is welcome; at the time he seemed the equal of his contemporaries (and fellow Blue Note stars) Freddie Hubbard and Donald Byrd, but the decades have set his brilliant and apparently inexhaustible imagination apart. Mobley, too, is someone whose laconic style never overstayed its welcome, although his occasional reed-squeaks might have given the producer a problem, had the session been considered for immediate release.
So you could say that it all turned out for the best. At The Jazz Corner Of The World will always remain a classic of live jazz recording, to which Just Coolin’ – released in a sleeve approximating Reid Miles’s original Blue Note designs – provides something more than a footnote.
Neil Young is releasing a new EP, The Times, through Amazon Music.
Streaming from September 18, the EP includes a politically-charged collection of classics spanning Neil Young’s catalogue as well as a cover of Bob Dylan’s "The Times They Are A-Changin’".
The Times EP contains protes...
Neil Young is releasing a new EP, The Times, through Amazon Music.
Streaming from September 18, the EP includes a politically-charged collection of classics spanning Neil Young’s catalogue as well as a cover of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’“.
The Times EP contains protest songs like “Ohio”, “Alabama”, “Southern Man” and “Campaigner”. The EP also features “Lookin’ For A Leader 2020”, a revised update to a song which was originally released on Young’s 2006 Living with War.
The Times’ tracklist: “Alabama”
“Campaigner”
“Ohio”
“The Times They Are A-Changin’”
“Lookin’ for a Leader 2020”
“Southern Man”
“Little Wing”
Jonathan Richman has announced details of a new project.
Just A Spark, On Journey From The Dark begins online from September 1.
According to Pitchfork, the new project will feature music, poetry, interviews and more, with guest musical appearances.
The series launches on Richman's Bandcamp ...
Jonathan Richman has announced details of a new project.
Just A Spark, On Journey From The Dark begins online from September 1.
According to Pitchfork, the new project will feature music, poetry, interviews and more, with guest musical appearances.
Richman released his last solo album, SA, in 2018. Earlier this month, he reissued his fourth solo album I, Jonathan on vinyl for the first time earlier this month.
A new box set covering John Lennon's post-Beatles career will be released on October 9, 2020, to coincide with what would have been his 80th birthday.
Gimme Some Truth: The Ultimate Mixes arrives via Capitol/UMe in a variety of physical and digital formats, including a Deluxe Edition Box Set and ...
A new box set covering John Lennon‘s post-Beatles career will be released on October 9, 2020, to coincide with what would have been his 80th birthday.
Gimme Some Truth: The Ultimate Mixes arrives via Capitol/UMe in a variety of physical and digital formats, including a Deluxe Edition Box Set and as 1CD, 2CD, 2LP, 4LP and streaming/download.
The songs have all been completely remixed from scratch. Here’s the new mix of “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)”.
Here’s the tracklisting for the deluxe box set. It also comes with a 124-page book of interviews, previously unseen photographs, letters, lyric sheets, tape boxes and more from the Lennon-Ono archives plus a poster, postcards and a bumper sticker. A Blu-ray audio disc features the 36 tracks in high definition 24-96 stereo, 5.1 surround sound and Dolby Atmos. A 2-CD set features the same tracks in stereo.
CD1
1. Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)
2. Cold Turkey
3. Working Class Hero
4. Isolation
5. Love
6. God
7. Power To The People
8. Imagine
9. Jealous Guy
10. Gimme Some Truth
11. Oh My Love
12. How Do You Sleep?
13. Oh Yoko!
14. Angela
15. Come Together (live)
16. Mind Games
17. Out The Blue
18. I Know (I Know)
CD2
1. Whatever Gets You Thru The Night
2. Bless You
3. #9 Dream
4. Steel and Glass
5. Stand By Me
6. Angel Baby
7. (Just Like) Starting Over
8. I’m Losing You
9. Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)
10. Watching The Wheels
11. Woman
12. Dear Yoko
13. Every Man Has A Woman Who Loves Him
14. Nobody Told Me
15. I’m Stepping Out
16. Grow Old With Me
17. Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
18. Give Peace A Chance
BLU-RAY AUDIO DISC
All of the above thirty-six tracks, available in High Definition audio as:
1. HD Stereo Audio Mixes (24 bit/96 kHz)
2. HD 5.1 Surround Sound Mixes (24 bit/96 kHz)
3. HD Dolby Atmos Mixes
A more compact set features these tracks:
1. Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)
2. Cold Turkey
3. Isolation
4. Power To The People
5. Imagine
6. Jealous Guy
7. Gimme Some Truth
8. Come Together (live)
9. #9 Dream
10. Mind Games
11. Whatever Gets You Thru The Night
12. Stand By Me
13. (Just Like) Starting Over
14. Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)
15. Watching the Wheels
16. Woman
17. Grow Old with Me
18. Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
19. Give Peace a Chance
Yo La Tengo have announced details of a new EP, Sleepless Night.
Released on October 9 by Matador Records, this six-song EP features a new song, "Bleeding", plus covers of songs by The Byrds, The Delmore Brothers, Bob Dylan, Ronnie Lane and The Flying Machine. You can hear the band's cover of The...
Yo La Tengo have announced details of a new EP, Sleepless Night.
Released on October 9 by Matador Records, this six-song EP features a new song, “Bleeding”, plus covers of songs by The Byrds, The Delmore Brothers, Bob Dylan, Ronnie Lane and The Flying Machine. You can hear the band’s cover of The Byrds’ “Wasn’t Born To Follow” below.
The songs on Sleepless Night were originally released as one side of an LP included within a limited-edition catalogue for Yoshitomo Nara’s Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition. The artist worked in collaboration with Yo La Tengo to choose the EP’s songs. The new edition of the EP features cover art by Nara.
