The Fat Angel Sings

On the 35th anniversary of Pearl Jam’s generation-shaking debut, here’s how the band’s members and collaborators remember its creation

Stone Gossard was 24 years old, and not ready to give up. In March 1990, Andrew Wood, the singer of Gossard’s band, Mother Love Bone, died of an overdose, just weeks before they were supposed to release their major-label debut. That summer, Gossard and his bandmates, including bassist Jeff Ament, were left mourning and adrift. Mother Love Bone had experienced the kind of instant success that made other local bands furious, signing a record deal after playing fewer than 10 shows.

What were the odds of winning that lottery twice? “I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Gossard said. “But I knew I wanted to make more demos and make more songs. I felt like I could do it again.”

He was, of course, correct. Within a few months of Wood’s death, Gossard composed an album’s worth of extraordinary songs, or at least the bones of them, minus vocal melodies and lyrics. “I’m pretty persistent,” said Gossard, who maintained a calm, prescient certainty that he would find another worthy band, another great singer. He was encouraged by the surge of Seattle rock around him, from Mudhoney, fronted by Gossard and Ament’s former Green River bandmate Mark Arm, to Soundgarden, whose next album would be “Badmotorfinger”. “I knew there was more out there,” said Gossard. “Andy was special, but I knew that there were other artists and other people out there that had a completely different thing.”

Gossard developed his new guitar riffs and arrangements in the attic of his parents’ house, alongside another guitarist he started hanging out with that year. Mike McCready was a metal kid turned Stevie Ray Vaughan acolyte with a gift for the kind of fluid solos that could make him “another singer in the band,” as Gossard saw it. At first, though, McCready wasn’t quite sure what they were supposed to be doing. “Stone asked me to play with him,” he recalled, “and after a week, we were in his parents’ attic, with his dog Hillie at his feet. And I said, ‘Dude, do you wanna play in a band together? What’s going on here?’ ‘Cause Stone keeps everything close to the chest, still does. And he said, ‘Yeah,’ so I was like, ‘OK,’ and I broke up the other band I was playing in, like, the next day.”

The music they were making was moody, turbulent and dramatic;  it’s not hard to hear Gossard’s grief and confusion in it. But much of it also had an obvious swagger and drive, sometimes with grooves that hinted at funk, or at least a Jane’s Addiction-like approximation of it. “I like propulsion, I like rhythm,” Gossard said. “I wanted people jumping up and down. It can be kind of like ‘Achilles Last Stand,’ or anything moving toward that heavy, funky, grooving, chaotic thing.”

Ament and Gossard had slipped apart for a few months. “He told me he was writing some songs,” said Ament, who considered going back to art school. “At that point, I just needed to not play music for a while. I felt like I had kind of used up my chances at that point.” But Ament fell back in love with music after filling in on bass for another friend’s band, and ended up back with Gossard for their still-unnamed new project. In a July 1990 Rolling Stone piece on the delayed release of Mother Love Bone’s LP, “Apple”, Gossard and Ament said they recorded 12 instrumental demos and were “scouting additional talent for an entirely new group.”

To record those demos, Gossard reached out to Seattle’s best drummer, Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron. “I’ve met him a couple of times,” Gossard recalled thinking. “I’m presumptuous, so I’m actually going to call him and see if he’ll do it.” Guided by huge cardboard chord charts pasted up on the walls of Reciprocal Studios in Seattle, they knocked out the songs over two weekends. “I got the impression that he definitely had a pretty big picture of what this next musical endeavor was going to be,” said Cameron. “I felt like the music was very well-arranged and very well-focused for a potential singer. It felt like everything was parted out for vocals.” In some cases, the path was laid out: The song that would become “Black” (temporarily titled “E Ballad”) already had its wordless hook in the demo. The early version of “Alive” is an anomaly, since Gossard originally wrote the music in the Mother Love Bone days, and Wood had written an entirely different song to it. Titled “Dollar Short,” its lyrics and melodies are apparently lost to history. Mother Love Bone rehearsed it and played it at least once live but never recorded it in a studio.

Former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons told Gossard and Ament about a guy living in San Diego named Eddie Vedder, who had recently made an impression on Irons and his friends, Flea among them, with his daring antics on a camping trip. “They were jumping off cliffs together on the river or something,” said Gossard. “He was well thought of.” Camping skills aside, Irons did also manage to mention at some point that Vedder “sings really good.”

Vedder got his hands on the tape, labelled “Stone Gossard Demos,” and the music on it stirred something in him. “I recorded my vocals in four or five hours,” Vedder said in 2009. He famously wrote most of the lyrics and melodies in his head while surfing after a couple sleepless nights. He was, at the time, working as a security supervisor at a petroleum company, while singing in bands and making four-track recordings in his home  —  the same spot where he recorded his vocals over the demo tape. “I just didn’t think about it,” he added. “And it changed our lives in infinite ways. It’s almost terrifying to listen to it. It gave me what’s certainly the best life I’ve ever lived  —  to be able to support my kids, to be able to travel. It was the best five hours I ever spent.”

The parts that Vedder laid down on “Alive” and “Once” (plus the eventual “Jeremy” B side, “Footsteps”) got eerily close to what would end up as the finished versions on “Ten“. There’s a rock-opera narrative there — the same character is in all three songs — that’s not necessarily obvious on the album. But the ingredients were all present, beginning with that singular singing voice, low, resonant and unabashedly passionate, the antidote to a decade of hard-rock singers trying to out-high-note each other. “I loved his low register immediately,” said Gossard. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is so great. Nobody’s going down there.’” Vedder’s elliptical tales of adolescent trauma were a perfect fit with music that blended classic-rock tropes (especially McCready’s solos) with punk energy, grunge guitar tones and the groove-heavy vibe of early-Nineties alt-rock. The music on that cassette helped define the sound, style and attitudes of a generation. It made Pearl Jam so ridiculously popular that they had to spend a decade retrenching.

All that said, Vedder didn’t completely nail it on his first try. “There was one part in there that’s as hysterical as anything I’ve ever heard  —  I haven’t laughed so hard in years,” Vedder said. He’s referring to his early version of “Once,” which is easily the goofiest thing he’s ever recorded. The humongous chorus is intact, but the rest wavers between bizarre spoken word segments and ill-advised falsetto funk breaks. “It becomes this little audio play or something. I’m fortunate that they were able to see beyond that and give me the job.”

Before Vedder actually got the gig, the other guys had to get to know him. In October 1990, the singer was able to get seven days off from his day job. He was ready to make the 1,200-mile drive from San Diego, only to be surprised and delighted to hear that Gossard and Co. would cover the cost of flying him out. “I was like, ‘Wow, OK… I don’t have to pay for it?’” Before he came out, Vedder completed two or three more songs over Gossard’s demos, including “Black.”

Vedder wanted to overcome any potential awkwardness by getting straight to work. “He called and said, ‘I just have one request, and that’s when we get there, if I can go straight from the airport to the practice place and we can play,’” recalled Ament. “And so, that was kinda our mode for the next week. We’d play for three or four hours, and we go over and get a bean burrito at Mama’s, and we’d play until seven or eight at night, and then we’d hang out and drink some wine or whatever and whatever we did, and we did that for five or six days straight, and half the time we were working on songs we already knew, and half the time we were, like, jamming.”

It was clear to everyone involved that the band was the real deal. “I had never really been in a situation like that, where all five guys were fuckin’ firing on all cylinders,” said McCready. “And it wasn’t too thought out. I mean, we’d rehearsed prior to it, but when it happened, it was like, ‘OK.’ I felt like we could fuckin’ take on some other bands. I was like, ‘We’re fuckin’ great!’”

On drums was another newcomer, Dave Krusen, who grew up half an hour away from Seattle, bashing out on prog-rock in his basement; the Police’s Stewart Copeland was a musical role model. Shortly before Vedder’s arrival, Krusen heard that the former members of Mother Love Bone needed a drummer. He called up Ament and had a successful jam session. “It was right in the mode of the stuff that I loved to play,” says Krusen, who developed the highly syncopated style he used on “Ten” simply by following Ament’s parts. The bassist eventually gave him a James Brown live album for Christmas and suggested he study it. Struggling with a drinking problem, Krusen would play on all of “Ten” and then immediately be pushed out of the band.  “He was pretty out of control,” said Gossard. But his former bandmates still love his playing, and reunited with him for their 2017 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Dave Krusen was a real hero,” said Vedder. “He was really, really a great drummer. He had a great flow and a great style.”

Pearl Jam’s original line-up, who were about to christen themselves Mookie Blaylock, jammed for five or six days and came away with most of “Ten” ready to go, as a 10-song rough demo they knocked out at the end of that week demonstrates. “It wasn’t an audition,” said Vedder. “It was just an art project.” By January 1991, he had relocated permanently to Seattle, and the band went into the studio to record pro-level demos of several songs. One of them, “Alive,” ended up as the version on their finished album, despite attempts to re-record it. “We tried to do it and it was just like, ‘This is cool, but this one just has an urgency to it,’” said Krusen. “The fact that it isn’t as clean-sounding  —  and it’s not as ‘good’ sounding  —  just worked for that track, in the context of the lyrics and all that. We had to capture a feeling, and that was more important than the sound quality of the recording.”

When Pearl Jam entered Seattle’s London Bridge Studios in March to begin recording in earnest for the album, the band was well-rehearsed, especially after playing a bunch of live dates opening for Alice in Chains. The producer was Rick Parashar, whom they’d met on the Temple of the Dog album. But some of the musicians describe Parashar as more of an engineer than a producer. “Stone and Jeff were really doing the producing,” says Krusen. “And that’s how they got the sounds they did. Rick was more of a sounding board, and a great engineer.” Krusen’s first child was born just as they started recording, and he “was drinking every day” during the sessions. Considering all that, he plays remarkably well. “I learned to play on various substances,” he shrugs, though he regrets some of his performances.

“It was more difficult than making Temple of the Dog,” said Gossard. “That’s what I remember thinking. We overthought it. You can get really bogged down as a young band in the process of recording.” Eventually, tensions grew between the band and Parashar (who died in 2014). “It felt dysfunctional,” Gossard added. “We didn’t know where we wanted to go and that’s where it broke down, so communication got bad, and it just went south.” Nailing “Even Flow” was the hardest part, with Vedder recalling them recording it 70 times or more. Krusen partially blames himself. “That song has a giant edit in the middle of it because I just had a hard time tracking it. I don’t know why.”

Vedder was apparently unaware of his bandmates’ worries and tensions during the sessions.  Unlike Gossard and Ament, he had never made a professional album before, except for his contribution to “Hunger Strike.” “I’m glad I didn’t hear that then,” Vedder said, “because they had made records, and I thought they knew what they were doing! And I thought that this was my first chance to make a real record, and to be honest, I was pretty damn focused on the job at hand. I was in a new town and I was in a new whatever, so that replaced my friends and family, that batch of songs and writing. It was a big deal to be able to make a real record.”

When it came time for vocal overdubs, Parashar needed a break and brought in engineer Don Gilmore, who would later become a producer for Linkin Park and others. Gilmore recalls Vedder actually living in the recording studio, sleeping on a couch. “He had pictures, and artwork  —  kind of like an insane person  —  put up all over the studio,” Gilmore says with a laugh. The studio’s security system required Vedder to be locked in at night, but he didn’t mind. “Eddie wanted to redo stuff and redo stuff and redo stuff,” adds Gilmore. “He really wanted to get things right. So I come in in the morning, I unlock the door, and Eddie would come out and he’d be drawing and doing things and having coffee, and he’s like, ‘Yep, let’s do it.’ So we’d get in there and would just work all day.”

Vedder was revising lyrics, and also trying to get the vocal takes up to his standards, which were already quite high. “He had complete command over what he was doing,” says Gilmore. “Eddie just was in search of perfection, not unlike a lot of big artists. . . . He was sort of internally producing himself and directing himself. He had an idea of what he wanted, and nobody was going to tell him it would be a different way.”

Engineer Tim Goldstone mixed the album in the English countryside, with the band hanging out in the pastoral setting of Ridge Farm Studio, where the Smiths had recorded Meat Is Murder. It was mostly relaxed. Between some minor overdubs, most of the band played tennis, and McCready recalls “smoking a bunch of hash” and listening to a couple of Pink Floyd albums that Ament suggested. But Vedder remembered at least one battle: He had to fight off an effort to cut 45 seconds out of “Black,” including the part where he sings, “I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life.” “That’s almost the peak of the song there,” said Vedder, still a little peeved, “and it almost got lost.”

At some point in the process, the band is convinced something went wrong. The guitars and drums float inside stadium-size digital reverb that now sounds more Eighties than Nineties, which they tried to rectify with a tougher-sounding 2009 remix by Brendan O’Brien. In general, the members of Pearl Jam are more critical of “Ten” than most of their fans. “From a musical point of view, it still seems kind of unrealized,” said Gossard. “But that just shows I can’t hear it.” Still, he loves playing the songs live: “The way we inhabit the songs and what they mean to all of us now is incredible, in terms of what they mean to the crowd  —  and how long ago they were written and how they still reveal new things.”

In the end, “Ten” is the sound of a band settling in for what they already knew would be a long, long ride. “We would always think, ‘What’s the third record going to be, what’s the fourth record going to be like?’” said Vedder. “We were really wanting to figure it out, knowing it was somehow going to get better. And we weren’t going to stop trying.”

While mainly known for its influential punk scene, Washington DC also had a thriving indie rock scene in the late ’80s and early-’90s that was heavily influenced by the UK’s C-86 scene and labels like Creation, Cherry Red and 4AD. Velocity Girl, in fact, were named for Primal Scream’s song on C-86, and played a similar style of very fuzzy janglepop.

The group included former Black Tambourine member Archie Moore and, originally, Bridget Cross who, when she left to focus on Unrest, would be replaced by vocalist Sarah Shannon. The band’s gift for melody, and love of shambolic, noisy guitars, is evident on this EP that collects songs from three early 7″s. “My Forgotten Favorite,” which would turn up a few years later on the Clueless soundtrack, is the obvious standout (and arguably Velocity Girl best song), but the other five songs are equally stellar.

Extended listening: Velocity Girl were more fond of 7″s than EPs, but their 1993 debut “Copacetic” (released, like all their albums, on Sub Pop) has held up well, and gotten better with age.

This new compilation “1989-1992” covers the band’s pre-Sub Pop years and shows that their skill with a tune was there from the beginning, across several line-up changes and numerous early releases. The all-time classic “Forgotten Favorite” is included, as is their debut single “I Don’t Care If You Go,” featuring original vocalist Bridget Cross (later of Unrest). There are also crucial split single and compilation contributions, a few choice covers (Beat Happening, The Jam) and even a pair of unreleased tunes.

Newly remastered and featuring extensive liner notes by DC scene scholar John R. Davis and gorgeous art by Galine Tumaysan, “1989-1992” is the comprehensive view of their early years that Velocity Girl has long deserved and their fans have long wanted.

released August 28th, 2026

35 years after “Ten” started it all, the band’s live performance of the album is coming to vinyl for the very first time! “Ten Live” is the complete “Ten” performance recorded on April 29th, 2016, at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center.

The three-sided LP captures a historic night when Pearl Jam performed the album in its entirety — for only the second time in the band’s history and the first time ever in the U.S. On April 29th, 2016, Pearl Jam played their 10th sold-out show in South Philadelphia. To mark the occasion, the venue had a special surprise for the band: a banner reading “Pearl Jam 10 South Philadelphia Sellouts” made to hang in the rafters of the Wells Fargo Center.

Seeing the banner, Eddie knew there was another way to celebrate.
“I saw that number and I was like, I think we gotta do it,” Eddie told the Philadelphia crowd from the stage that night.
What followed was Pearl Jam performing “Ten” all the way through, track-by-track.

“Philly gives back, they just give back,” Eddie told the crowd that night. “We just tried to figure out something that we could get for you. Something that we could wrap and unwrap with you.”

Preorders begin today, with the album arriving November. 27th in two colour editions: (“Turned My World To”) Black vinyl and a limited-edition clear vinyl pressing

One of the most influential progressive rock bands of the late ‘60s / early ‘70s, Soft Machine’s initial line-up was Robert Wyatt (drums, vocals), Kevin Ayers (bass, guitar, vocals), Daevid Allen (guitar) and Mike Ratledge (organ). They emerged from the UK underground in 1967, featuring prominently at epoch-making London venues such as the UFO Club and Middle Earth to establish a powerful reputation over the next decade with a series of accomplished albums and some innovative concert performances (notably in the UK and France) and with a support slot on the Jimi Hendrix Experience US tours throughout 1968.

Centred around the band’s five CBS albums (“Third” to “Seven“), “Slightly All The Time” includes an entirely different and previously unreleased set of recordings of the “Fifth” album. It also contains all of the band’s extant BBC sessions (the complete performances for the first time) and a significant amount of previously unavailable audio-visual full concert recordings.

After two albums for ABC/Probe – “The Soft Machine” and “Volume Two” – they signed to CBS/Columbia with a line-up consisting of Wyatt, Ratledge, saxophonist Elton Dean and bassist Hugh Hopper, releasing their most successful long player, “Third”, came in 1970. This was followed by four more albums during a period of significant acclaim across Europe, and a frequently evolving line-up.

Soft Machine disbanded in 1978, apart from the occasional reunion, before being relaunched as Soft Machine Legacy in 2004, touring extensively and making many more albums. Since 2016 they have been known simply as Soft Machine and in March this year the current line-up issued their latest album, “Thirteen“. They will be playing live across the UK and Europe for the rest of the year and well into 2027, including festivals and club dates in Italy, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Hungary.

This extensive boxed set presents the story of the most vital, influential period in the Soft Machine story. Centred around their five CBS albums, all remastered from the original ¼” tapes and including the discovery of an entirely different and previously unreleased set of recordings of their “Fifth” album, it also contains all of their extant BBC sessions (some have been released before, decades ago, these are the complete performances for the first time) and a significant amount of previously unavailable audio-visual, full concert recordings from Europe (UK/France/Belgium/Germany).

Packaged in a sturdy 12” x 12” slipcase, with a hardback book featuring many rare photographs and extensive notes by journalist and author Sid Smith, progressive rock fans (who buy detailed boxed sets like this in large quantities), will delight in this comprehensive examination of one the great names in the genre.

Released on the 30th of October.

Roky Erickson’s The Evil One, the horror-rock masterpiece from our Austin hometown legend, restored to its original 1981 glory.

Roky Erickson’s definitive version of ‘The Evil One’ will be released by Fire, as a 15-track deluxe edition, restoring the original front cover from San Francisco’s 415 Records release for the first time since 1981.

The legend of 13th Floor Elevators leader Roky Erickson is one of the most compelling in rock and the brilliant “The Evil One” is perhaps his most influential album. Not widely heard at the time of release, this brilliant album grew to be an eccentric cult classic (aka the mother lode) in the following decades.

The recording sessions took place in 1978 and 1979 (with producer Stu Cook of Creedence Clearwater Revival fame) and 15 songs were completed. A UK version was released by CBS in 1980, followed by a US version in 1981 via 415 Records but each release had a different 10-song track listing. Luckily this new reissue of the album has all the 15 tracks including “Two-Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)”, “I Think of Demons”, “I Walked With a Zombie”, “Cold Night for Alligators” and “Night of the Vampire”.

Erickson’s place in the pantheon of outsider rock isn’t in question: he snarls about demons, zombies, vampires, ghosts, and more demons with all the passion and intensity of his music, good pitch and soul: he’s got it all but is his voice that shows the traits of the greatest rock singers.

Presented across two LPs cut at 45 rpm for maximum sonic depth and clarity, the release brings together the complete recordings from the legendary 1978 and 1979 sessions. The package includes a collector’s booklet with liner notes by acclaimed Austin music journalist Joe Nick Patoski, who attended a recording session for The Evil One in 1979. Alongside rare photographs and archival images from the collection of Roky’s then manager, Craig Luckin.

Austin music journalist Joe Nick Patoski, who attended one of the album’s 1979 sessions, contributes a new essay to the LP and CD packaging, exploring Erickson’s extraordinary career, enduring influence and place in Texas rock history.

More than a standalone reissue, this deluxe edition of “The Evil One” opens an exciting new series honouring Roky Erickson’s extraordinary body of work, with “Gremlins Have Pictures” and “Don’t Slander Me” to follow in 2027.

Deluxe gatefold. The complete ’78 and ’79 sessions across two 45 RPM LPs for maximum depth and clarity. Pressed on orange and blue “Atom Brain Splatter” vinyl with a 24-page booklet of rare photos and liner notes. Ultra Limited

Limited Edition ‘Evil’ Black & White Splatter 2XLP

‘The Evil One’ is out 30th October. Available in:

“I’ve always wanted to use that title,” Sam Beam says of “Hen’s Teeth“, his eighth full-length album and his sixth for Sub Pop Records. “I just love it. To me it suggests the impossible. Hen’s teeth do not exist. And that’s what this record felt like: a gift that shouldn’t be there but it is. An impossible thing but it’s real.”

“Hen’s Teeth” and his previous album, “Light Verse“, are siblings of a sort. They were recorded during the same sessions after a year-long dry spell, with the same band, at Waystation studio in Laurel Canyon. “When I’ve been on a writing kick, and the band can meet me where I’m at, they push me into something I hadn’t imagined. I’m at a point in my life where spontaneity is a lot more important to me. I don’t have as much to prove as I used to. I’m a lot freer and I love making music more than ever. There are no right or wrong answers. You just pray for your luck and try your best.”

In this case prayers were answered and luck struck hard. The musicians cohered so quickly and inspired each other so much that they were often getting songs recorded in just a few takes, sometimes at the rate of two or three per day. The two albums might therefore be thought of as fraternal twins: they share DNA and complement each other but have distinct identities and are defined as much by their differences as their similarities.

Light Verse (2024) took its name from a form of poetry that makes heavy use of wordplay, humour, and nonsense. Its cover depicts figures in silhouette, floating or falling through a cyanotype sky. It’s a sweet and airy album, impressionistic, at times even flirting with abstraction, a hearty shaking off of the doom and gloom of the Covid era. Many of the songs are named for ideas or feelings that gesture toward hope amidst uncertainty: “You Never Know,” “All in Good Time” (a gorgeous duet with Fiona Apple), “Cutting It Close,” “Taken by Surprise.”

The world of Hen’s Teeth is earthier, darker, more robust and more tactile than that of Light Verse. The songs have titles like “Roses,” “Robin’s Egg,” “Dates and Dead People,” “Singing Saw.” “Run into the one you love forever / Laugh into each other’s empty mouth,” Beam sings on “Roses,” the album’s first track. It’s one of several songs in which lovers are depicted as so deeply entwined they physically merge. “Paper and Stone” recalls that “But for the time we fell in two / You’d be me and I’d be you / One crust of bread could fit in our mouths / You’d breathe in and I’d let it out.” And on “In Your Ocean,” we find Beam “Praying for dry ground / Though I only want to drown / When I find myself swimming in your ocean.”

The cover is a portrait of Beam surrounded on all sides by flourishing ferns and other tropical plant life. He is wearing a pin-stripe jacket and holding a massive cluster of grapes, prodigious beard spilling down his chest. He could be a local harvest god or a gentleman outlaw holed up in a jungle cave. There are white feathers covering his eyes but these somehow do not suggest blindness. Rather they seem to literalize the poetic notion of an artist’s vision taking flight. The whole surreal scene is washed in humid, spooky red. It’s somewhere between Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, and the contrast with the cool blue-white palette of “Light Verse” could not be starker.

“The experiments in this one were more with genre than with form. For the last couple years one of my go-to’s has been Van Morrisson’s Astral Weeks, that style where jazz musicians play folk music and it blossoms in different ways than folk musicians are normally interested in doing. ‘Singing Saw’ feels like a song that Dock Boggs and Simon & Garfunkel might have done together. ‘Roses’ and ‘In Your Ocean’ are straight forward folk rock, but they build to these apocalyptic endings. ‘Dates and Dead People’ and ‘Defiance, Ohio’ take a lot from Tropicalia, which is some of my favorite music too. I don’t see it as that much different from jazz. All these forms have been in rock music forever.”

About the players: David Garza on guitar, Sebastian Steinberg on bass, and Tyler Chester on keyboards. Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow, and Kyle Crane all play drums. Paul Cartwright plays violin and mandolin among other stringed instruments; he also handled string arrangements for both records. The indie-country trio I’m With Her appears on the ebullient lead single, “Robin’s Egg,” and again on the tender, mournful “Wait Up.”

“I’m obsessed with duets,” Beam says. “Ever since I did “Love Letter to Fire” with Jesca Hoop. I just love the form. It’s inherently dramatic. And it’s so fun. I had these songs and I finished them with I’m With Her in mind.” Arden Beam—Beam’s daughter—contributes harmonies and backing vocals onthe tracks, “Roses,” “Singing Saw,” “Defiance, Ohio” and “Grace Notes.” Her contributions lend a personal poignancy, as well as a wonderful sonic texture, to “Hen’s Teeth“. Born two months before the release of his debut album, “The Creek Drank the Cradle” (2002), she is now 23 years old and a musician herself—the first of his children to appear on one of his records.

“It’s exciting, making it more of a family affair. I like making Iron and Wine records, but I like the collaboration even more. Interacting with a bunch of friends and being blown away by what they can bring, musically and emotionally, to a set of three chords. I get to play all day with these people I love and they respond by giving me their most vulnerable, expressive self. It’s the weirdest, best job ever.”

Julia Holter always knew that there was more to the song “Materia” than what she included on her wondrous 2024 album, Something in the Room She Moves. She had written the tune not long after the tours for 2018’s Aviary concluded, and it worked well for solo shows—her voice and piano, lyrics still morphing as she played with the meaning.
 
But on the new Materia, a kind of companion LP to Something, Holter has realized not one but two distinct versions of the song. “Materia 2” is a hallucinatory dream of drum machines, fretless bass, and clarinet, Holter’s voice spiralling through ether alongside that of Jessika Kenney. And on “Materia 3,” intended as a hidden bonus track in an homage to the CD era of her youth, Holter literally slows down the take from Something. The change not only emphasizes the unpredictable glory of the harmonies within but also reiterates the song’s emotional sophistication, the sense that it’s about learning how to live.
 
“Materia” is only seven tracks long, but Holter works in nearly that many modes here. There are two astounding improvisations, one where she builds a one-person ensemble of drum machines and synth lines and another where she manipulates her voice until each word seems to contain another symphony. And yet another is built from a riff that came from a demo for “Something”, a demo that itself is one of “Materia’s” most spellbinding and emotional pieces, “My Twin.” These seven songs show that Holter is among her generation’s most fluid writers of art-pop, moving among ideas and idioms with true exploratory aplomb. “Materia” is a kind of playground for Holter, where each distinct scene steadily coheres into a moving whole.

I made it inspired by the musicians that made up “Something In the Room She Moves” and its tour. I wanted to continue building songs in this realm & it became a sister album that wandered off to its own world.
The fretless bass writing & performance of Devra Hoff are central to this record; I have been turning her bass up high in the mix since “Loud City Song”. Beth Goodfellow‘s percussion is mesmerizing & her creative spirit contagious; studio recordings of her, Devra and me playing at once, vibing off each other, were the foundation for a lot of these songs.
Chris Speed’s kaleidoscopic winds form another main vocal in a way & he has generously contributed wild and visionary melodies to my songs since 2013. Maia’s transcendent flute is also like a voice—she sometimes is in fact singing into the flute, forming a pivotal moment in the record during “My Lost One”.

One of my favorite voices ever is that of Jessika Kenney, so I was delighted for her to bring her magic to “Materia 2”. It was a joy to record again 64 Sound w the assistance of Tyler Karmen and also record overdubs Stones Throw Studios. Importantly, enormous thanks to talented Kenny Gilmore, who co-produced, engineered & mixed the record; I am fortunate to work w a longtime friend w a great ear who always gets it. And the great Heba Kadry did a beautiful job mastering.

Thank you so much to Chantal Anderson for bringing her vision over to my house to shoot this special & unearthly photo that has become the cover. And as always, very appreciative of the great Matthew Cooper for his gorgeous art design.

Loving appreciation overall for my dear partner Tashi Wada’s wide array of offerings throughout the making of “Materia” from his dreamy analogue synth work to tape engineering to art direction to photos to his overall kindness & support.

Thankful for Domino Recording Co making this record happen so thoughtfully.

Boston has announced that they will release a 50th anniversary edition of their iconic debut album in 2027 featuring “lost demos” recorded during the sessions for the original LP.

In late summer of 1976, a self-titled album from Tom Scholz’s basement studio, was quietly released on CBS’s Epic Records label, under the name BOSTON. Listeners across the country quickly embraced the bright, punchy BOSTON sound, with its relatable lyrics, meticulously double-tracked guitar tracks, and singer Brad Delp’s powerful, crystalline lead vocals. The sheer assertiveness of the writing, performances, and sonics—coupled with the album’s joyfulness—helped thrust the band and their debut into the stratosphere. Within three months of its release, BOSTON was awarded both gold and platinum status by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), while nearly every song from the album was in constant rotation on pop and rock radio.

The band revealed the news on the 50th anniversary of the release date for the “Boston” album, which originally arrived August 25th, 1976. The new expansion is being “released in close collaboration with Tom Scholz,” by Impex Records and is currently scheduled to come out in the second quarter of next year.

Recognizing that the album has been reissued a number of times over the years, Scholz personally supervised the production of the upcoming expansion, with a goal of delivering “the most authentic version of this oft-reissued classic,” the group detailed in a press release.

“Wishing to offer something truly unique to the millions of Boston fans who’ve supported the band through the years, Tom has—for the very first time—dug deep into his massive archive of recordings to find the long-lost, previously-unreleased demos he famously shopped to the labels before being signed by Epic Records,” they shared. “He painstakingly restored and remastered these elusive treasures with the help of producer, digital expert and Boston guitarist Gary Pihl, exclusively for this 50th anniversary release.”

Although the songwriting on Boston’s self-titled is fairly by the numbers by certain rock standards, the real power behind it is just how much Scholz put into the background. Having invented his own guitar pedal to work on most of the songs, his guitars have a cutting midrange that sounds like a metal guitarist just randomly decided to show up on a rock and roll tune.

Outside of playing most of the instruments himself, hearing Brad Delp pull off superhuman vocal exercises is the musical equivalent of looking into the sun half the time. ‘More Than A Feeling’ and ‘Smokin’ might get celebrated as singles, but taken as a whole, this album should be studied by any high-profile producer to know what to look for in a great mix.

The band’s signature hit “More Than A Feeling” entered The Billboard’s Hot 100 on September 18th, 1976 and peaked at Number 5 on Christmas Day, spending 19 weeks on the chart. The single also reached Number 4 on Cash Box’s singles chart. The album’s second single “Peace of Mind” was released on January 7th, 1977 and peaked at Number 22 on The Billboard’s Hot 100.

The specific demos that are being released have not been unveiled yet, but the press release says it will give music historians and fans a chance to “peek inside Tom’s basement studio — and the ability to trace how the creative process progressed as Scholz, vocalist Brad Delp and the other musicians were working on the Boston album. Additional details for the upgraded album note that Scholz and Pihl “restored” the demos, but they were “left in their original sonic state.”

Jack White honored Dolly Parton by covering her classic song “Jolene” during his performance in London on Tuesday night (August. 23rd).

Earlier in the day, Dolly Parton died at the age of 80. The country singer’s passing spawned an outpouring of tributes from fellow musicians and fans alike, as people from all walks of life celebrated Parton’s career and philanthropic achievements. White, a longtime admirer of Parton’s, posted a simple tribute on Instagram which read “Instant sainthood,” alongside a classic image of the country star. Then, during his concert at the Eventim Apollo in London, he opted to celebrate Parton with one of her best-known tunes.

After opening his set with the recent single “That’s How I’m Feeling,” followed by the White Stripes classic “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” White surprised the crowd by launching into “Jolene” for the first time in 19 years.

White was drawn to “Jolene” even before he became a musician. “I thought that was an interesting name when I started hearing that song as a teenager,” he recalled to NPR in 2008. “And I guess later on, as a songwriter, I started to think about names starting with ‘J,’ like that could be used almost accusatory, like Jezebel… Jolene.“

In a clip shared on social media (which you can watch below), White can be seen rocking through the emotionally-charged song. At one point he looked away and pointed to the sky, before then clasping his hands as if he was saying a prayer of thanks for Parton.

According to setlist.fm, the last time White performed “Jolene” in concert was 2007 during the White Stripes’ July 24 concert at Madison Square Garden. He had not performed it live during his solo career until today.

Dolly Parton originally released the song in 1974. It reached No. 1 on the country chart and earned the singer a pair of Grammy nominations. Decades later, the White Stripes put their own unique spin on the tune – first releasing it as the B-side to the single “Hello Operator,” before later making it a staple of their live sets (Parton referred to their interpretation of the tune as “wonderful”).

Foreigner are too release an expanded version of their album “Head Games” due out on October. 30th.

The box set version of the 1979 album, which features concert staples such as the title track and “Dirty White Boy,” will include a disc of outtakes and alternative versions, as well as a newly unearthed complete concert from the Head Games tour.

The previously unreleased song “Trouble” has been remixed and released as the first taste of the “Head Games” set, with a newly added guitar solo from none other than Peter Frampton.

You can hear “Trouble” below, Originally recorded in May 1979 during the original ‘Head Games’ album sessions at Atlantic Studios in New York City, “Trouble” was recently discovered during research for the ‘Head Games Deluxe’ edition album -. This previously unreleased track has been freshly remixed & remastered, and features a newly added guest guitar appearance by longtime friend of the band, Peter Frampton.

Foreigner are currently wrapping up the last few dates of their summer co-headlining tour with Lynyrd Skynyrd.