Evan Dando‘s February 2003 solo album, “Baby I’m Bored”, is getting a new reissue version later this year.
To be released in June as a 2CD/2LP and Limited Edition 2LP/2CD set, the reissue will include an extra disc of unheard and unreleased tracks, singles, b-sides and rarities , including alternative versions of “Shots Is Fired” featuring Liv Tyler and “Rancho Santa Fe”. the reissue includes extra disc of unheard unreleased tracks, singles, b-sides and rarities. “Dando has a flair for bruised melancholy that stands comparison with Gram Parsons and Alex Chilton.” Baby I’m Bored is a beautiful album of tender reflections on life, love and drug-induced folly set in soulful, country-tinged guitar pop.
Emerging after The Lemonheads disbanded Evan Dando returned to music first with a solo tour and ‘Live AtThe Brattle Theatre’ then came his debut solo album ‘Baby I’m Bored’.
Mature and autobiographical, ‘Baby I’m Bored’ is a stellar record that stripped Dando of his grunge label. At the time of recording, he was without the band which saw him lean more towards an achingly melodic alt-country rock sound. Self-deprecating, these are songs of decline and coming back from that. Elizabeth Moses, who married Dando in 2000, appears on the album’s cover.
The record includes “Hard Drive” and “All My Life” two tracks penned by Ben Lee and features contributions from producer/composer Jon Brion, producer Bryce Goggin, Tom Morgan, Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb, Calexico’s JohnConvertino and Joey Burns, ex-Spacehog frontman Royston Langdon, Come’s Chris Brokaw and Arthur Johnson.
Evan Dando
‘Baby I’m Bored’
The Extras disc includes:
Shots Is Fired (Alternative Version featuring Liv Tyler)
I Wanna Be Your Mamma Again
Tongue Tied
Whoops
Sucker Punch
The Same Thing You Thought Hard About… (Alternative Version)
Au Bord De La Seine
Rancho Santa Fe (Alternative Version)
A Walk In The Woods With Lionel Ritchie
Rudy With A Flashlight
Hannah & Gabi (Live Version)
The Same Thing You Thought Hard About… (Live Version)
Reissue: 2CD / 2LP / 2CD Bookback / 2LP Bookback
Released June 2017
The Routes always seem to be do something different stylistically on every record they release; from their largely R&B influenced debut album “Left My Mind”, to the playful US garage drenched “Alligator”, to the Strummin’ Mental madness of the “Instrumentals” album, right up until “Skeletons” in 2016 which saw them on more of a modern garage punk trip. It doesn’t seem to matter what they do, and who plays in the band; it still unmistakably sounds like The Routes. “In This Perfect Hell”, the fifth album by The Routes, brings you ten original songs. No filler and no covers. From the start, you can tell it’s not going to be your stereotypical garage album. This time The Routes seemed have strayed far from your average garage bands comfort zone. They have stripped everything right
shipping out on or around March 15th, 2017
Chuck Prophet’s smart new collection of songs, “Bobby Fuller Died For Your Sins”, begins with a celebration of the enigmatic one-hit rock curiosity who sang “I Fought The Law” in 1964 and then, shortly after the song took off, he was found dead in his car at the age of 23 years old.
Fuller’s death remains a mystery, and perhaps as a result, his song and story has resonance for record lovers like Chuck Prophet. He begins the second verse of “Bobby Fuller Died For Your Sins” by talking about the experience of listening: “I hear the record crackle, the needle skips and jumps,” he half-sings as the pedal steel guitar careens Byrds-like . That leads to Prophet’s central confession.
With that, we’re off, riding shotgun down some mythic highway with a rock true believer who is not sure of much beyond the primacy of two guitars-bass-and-drums and a handful of raggedly hacked chords. On this journey, the 53-year old Prophet whose past discography includes the pioneering psychedelic Americana band Green On Red and a stack of strong solo albums .
Prophet has described his new work as “California Noir.” With a few exceptions the gloriously leering “YourSkin,” a gem of a song that is most impassioned, the record bears little resemblance to the stylized L.A. noir of maybe say a James Ellroy novel. It’s murky, coated with fog and shadows – in some ways, it picks up where Prophet’s high-concept history of San Francisco, 2012’s album “Temple Beautiful” .
Its narratives are often dark: Several songs are set in the aftermath of gun violence – one pays homage to Alex Nieto, a Bay Area man killed by police; another tells of the tragic encounter between a shop girl with a song in her heart and a brutal “Killing Machine” who offs people at a store . Mostly, though, Prophet is drawn to the romance of rock culture.
Chuck Prophet has been on the road forever, he’s spent lifetimes amongst its traveling circus of savants and misfits. Sometimes his passion gets misplaced: The album’s most obvious misstep is “Bad Year for Rock and Roll,” which deserves an award for stating the obvious, over and over again. Its chorus ends with a telling couplet: “I wanna go out, but I’ll probably stay home.”
It’s an odd moment, especially since the rest of Bobby Fuller deals with what happens when you don’t stay home. The unsparing, possibly autobiographical “We Got Up and Played” finds Prophet and band standing around after soundcheck, facing the prospect of another night in a grimy club. Prophet goes acidic as he sketches the scene’s less-than-glorious aspects – the cast of characters includes “the bartender standing in the middle of the street with his pants around his neck.” It’s slightly sordid, sure, yet the song captures something fundamentally compelling about people who, despite long odds and great indifference, climb onto a stage and attempt to create music night after night.
Chuck Prophet – “Bobby Fuller Died For Your Sins” – 11/1/2017 – Paste Studios, New York, NY
Chuck’s new album features 13 original works that explore doomed love, loneliness and fast-paced violence via Chuck’s muscular songwriting craft. They include songs about Fuller, the death of David Bowie, and the killing of San Francisco security guard Alex Nieto that drew international headlines as “Death By Gentrification.”
‘Bobby Fuller’ finds Chuck coming full circle. He cut the album to tape at Hyde Street Studio in San Francisco, which also happens to be the same studio where Prophet did his very first recording session, while still in high school. Chuck brought out his ’64 Stratocaster for the sessions, conjuring a sound that Jonathan Richman once described as “gasoline in the sand, like a motorcycle at a hot dog stand.” He’s backed by The Mission Express, a band featuring his wife Stephanie Finch (vocals, keyboards, guitar), Kevin White (bass), Vicente Rodriguez (drums, vocals) and James DePrato (guitar).
Chuck Prophet – “Open Up Your Heart “– 1/11/2017 – Paste Studios, New York, NY
Lead single “Bad Year For Rock and Roll” is a timely homage to rock greats lost in 2016: “The Thin White Duke took a final bow / there’s one more star in the heavens now/I’m all dressed up in a mohair suit / watching Peter Sellers thinking of you.” “Jesus Was A Social Drinker” starts as a punchy mid-tempo rocker with clanking cowbell before unfurling into an explosive, psychedelic coda.
Chuck Prophet – “Bad Year for Rock and Roll” – 1/11/2017 – Paste Studios, New York, NY
Michael Stovall, who under the name Red Porch Kid, has crafted something pretty spectacular on his new solo project “Rocketship”. The entire album mixes ambient and Americana together to create a beautiful, folky, airy production. It’s not unlike Bon Iver’s ambitious 22, A Million, and at first listen seems at least somewhat influenced . Lyrically it’s a pretty standard growing up record, but sonically it challenges and rejuvenates, and Lord knows we need some more of that these days. Stovall is a founding member of Jackson Jones, who disbanded back in 2008. This is his second solo release, and his first under the name of Red Porch Kid. He wrote, recorded, and produced the record himself, which came out January 27th.
“Meg Duffy”, aka Hand Habits, is a singer, songwriter and guitarist from Upstate New York. She has been putting her time in on the road and in the studio over the past two years with pacific northwest band Mega Bog, and the Kevin Morby Band, making an impression on everyone she comes across with her natural charisma and uncharted talent as a multi-instrumentalist. But let Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void) be her open invitation to the world to step inside and take a much deeper look into who Duffy actually is. Tracked in an Upstate New York living room, then finished in her current home in Los Angeles – it is appropriate that this album was recorded by Meg herself – for Meg, who has an acute ear for detail, has touched every corner, has seen every vision ’til its end. Because of this, Wildly Idle feels incredibly intimate, like a secret between her and the listener. It hits soft, like warm water, and before you know it it is all around you – a bath, and Meg’s whisper has made its way inside you. Like many bedroom-debuts before it (Microphones, Jessica Pratt, Little Wings, Grouper) let this be the first of many to come, for Meg has music in her touch – and this is only the beginning. But let us not look to the future now, but instead stand alongside her, our trust in her will, both humble before the void, with her first chorus as the mission statement; ‘hold you like a flower, hold you like an hour glass’.”- Kevin Morby
Just lately I often look at albums and songs I adored growing up as a teenager and cannot believe how long ago that is . I remember listening to Rumours following it through all of my life. It is an album that was blighted by drama as we all know, Christine McVie defined the recording sessions as nothing but drama and arguments and it is a surprise it got finished at all. Given that the band’s two couples Christine McVie and her husband John; LindseyBuckingham and Stevie Nicks ,were embroiled in fights and conflict would have been enough to derail the recording process. As it was, the album Was made and stands as one of history’s greatest classic albums. Before looking at the background and its songs; Steve Nicks wrote Dreams in Sly Stone’s bed whilst credits his dyslexia for Go Your Own Way’s unusual drumming rhythm – there are a lot of other little-known facts you might not know about Rumours. Lindsey Buckingham’s sonic perfectionism meant his guitar was restrung every twenty minutes during Never Going Back Again; The Chain the legendary epic and only song credited to all five band members – has Christine McVie’s song “Keep Me There” is at the core and was the foundations before other members of the band piled in and added their ideas to the song. John McVie’s ten-note bass passage tees the song whilst Mick Fleetwood’s impassioned percussion gives it its drive and fervency. Aside from the music, the infamous extra-marital affairs threatened to split Fleetwood Mac for good. Not only did some of the songs blatantly put these affairs at their heart – Christine McVie’s “You Make Loving Fun” about the lighting technician she was in a relationship with; Lindsey Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way” a kiss-off and screw-you to Stevie Nicks. “Dreams” perhaps the centrepiece and most astonishing song on the album – struggled to get made and studio time was hard to come by as Buckingham’s iron first ruled the production.
The drama in Fleetwood Mac heightened shortly after the release of “Rumours”, rehearsal time became even more sacred; they weren’t just running through songs they could play in their sleep, they were reinforcing a bond that only comes with watching songs come to life and remembering how to work together despite their turbulent relationships.
The fact it did get made (with doubts from the band and a lack of enthusiasm) gives Rumours pristine beauty and haunting etherealness – plenty of hopefulness and intricate beauty. Affairs and cocaine were as prevalent and in-demand as was musical impetus and dedication to the music. We all know about the splits, rifts and Mick – quite often the fifth wheel who had to ensure the coldness and immense friction; although his marriage was on the rocks and he had an affair with Nicks around this time. Even before the album started recording, there were problems and press intrusion.
In spite of this, with speculations the original band members would return to the fold, the band came into the studio with plenty of stigma in their blood. Keith Olsen was fired as producer ,who put percussion and rhythm low in the mix – and the McVies formed Seedy Management: a company that put the band’s interest first and ensured recording sessions would begin on a good footing (sound-wise at least). Soon enough Buckingham stepped in and took control of the recording sessions. He wanted to make a ‘Pop’ album which was at odds with other members of the band – who came from a Blues-Rock background and favoured a looser and less disciplined style of recording. Buckingham’s discipline, vision and ultra-precise methodology and studio set-up were unique and inspired. Buckingham and McVie crafted the guitar-and-piano combinations together whilst John McVie played his bass facing Mick Fleetwood’s drums. Buckingham’s configurations and dynamics meant the band members were focused: instruments arranged to create the best sound.
Recording at the Record Plant, there was not a lot of after-recording socialising. Cocaine binges and frosty relationships meant the individual members were isolated throughout much of Rumours and lead to sleepless nights. “Rumours” music was astonishingly focused and inspiring in spite of all the problems. If you did not know about Fleetwood Mac’s backstory in 1977, you would assume Rumours was the product of a happy and together band in inspired form. Aside from “The Chain” all members coming together in an anthem for unity and holding on the remaining tracks were written alone by songwriters Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and StevieNicks.
If Nicks’Dreams seems like a message to keep focused and do not give in it has a breakup and heartbreak at its centre. The members of Fleetwood Mac were oblivious to the true nature of their (wracked and pain-stricken) songs until hindsight provided clarity. Try and make an album like Rumours today and it would simply not work. For a start, musicians are not as enigmatic and fascinating as the American-British alliance in this band . Despite Nicks’ hostility towards Buckingham – or his towards her more accurately – he still had a knack of making Nicks’ songs sumptuous and beautiful. Yes, there was enormous self-indulgence and excess during the recording that threatened to threaten productivity.
The open-ended budget meant late-night parties would last to the wee hours and sleep was an elusive construct. The band would finish drinking and snorting vast quantities of cocaine, being in a desperate, zombie-like state, and get straight down to recording. It became apparent the most productive results occurred under these conditions.
Talk all you like about legend, folklore and technical specifications: it is the music, pure and simple, the final product is what matters and damned to the petty squabbles around it. The music is near-perfect. You talk about albums that are beyond criticism and should be preserved forever: Rumours is on top of a very elite list.
The interplay between the three vocalists Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham – is stunning and the affection between them heartwarming. They were, and still are, brothers and sisters. Even at their most tense and uncertain, the respect they had for one another as musicians outranked any personal beefs. Buckingham’s crisp, clean and assured production makes songs like “Don’t Stop” infectious, luminous and endlessly catchy.
“Go Your Own Way” is, in my view, the best song on the album and benefits from a truly astonishing vocal turn. Dreams is that divine Nicks hymn; whilst McVie talked about Mick Fleetwood in “Oh Daddy” . ‘Big Daddy’ was the band’s nickname for the drummer – with Nicks providing the final line: “And I can’t walk away from you, baby/If I tried”. Perhaps a shot (from McVie) at the direction Fleetwood was taking the band, or a subtle illusion to their impending affair (Nicks’ line). “Gold Dust Woman” documents the struggles (Nicks) faced in L.A. Christine McVie came into her own as a writer and penned the hair-raising, transcendent “Songbird” – a little prayer from the keyboardist and a song about nobody and everyone. If the band’s two female writers were at their peak Lindsey Buckingham was stealing the limelight. Not only was his leadership and production a major factor in the Rumours’ success but his bittersweet songs were scene-stealing. Go Your Own Way and NeverGoing Back Again are obvious in their derivation but, mythology and cynicism aside, are incredible works of music. Second Hand News is the acoustic opener that starts things off wonderful; Buckingham’s hand in TheChain cannot be understated. The songwriting credits Buckingham had three solo credits from eleven; Nicks; McVie four makes the album a democracy and collaborative thing.
In the footage you’re about to hear, there’s an actual Fleetwood Mac rehearsal taking place just before the band embarked on their critically acclaimed Rumours tour in early 1977.
Caught on tape, we can hear Christine McVie, John McVie and Stevie Nicks delivering entertaining commentary on their roadies, but as soon as Lindsey Buckingham brings “Go Your Own Way” to life, it’s all work from there as the band joins in, treating this sacred rehearsal time as seriously as they would an actual live show.
This is a live version of Lindsey’s legendary song “Go Your Own Way”(One of my favorite songs of all-time)!! This is from Fleetwood Mac’s GREAT (February 1977) Rumours Tour Rehearsals. Whay a great musician Lindsey is, but this song is his masterpiece. This song is what started it all for me over those years ago.
Check out his breathtaking guitar solo towards the end.
Lindsey wrote Go Your Own Way (about Stevie) while on the road Fleeywood Mac’s 1975 concert tour. Although the second verse ~ Tell me why everything turned around, Packing up, shacking up is all you wanna do ~ wasn’t added to it until later ~1976. Stevie had asked him to remove the ~ Packing up, shacking up part, but he refused to do so. (I’m glad he kept it in.)
The Rumours world tour saw Fleetwood Mac on the road from February 24th, 1977 through to December 10th of that year, hitting North America, Europe, Japan and Oceania.
What makes this clip so great is hearing the teamwork that goes into making a song like “Go Your Own Way” happen – you never realize how intricate the guitar work actually is, and this rehearsal audio is sure to make you appreciate Fleetwood Mac’s attention to detail and out of this world live performances even more!.
There are few albums as enduring and as mysterious as Rumours. It is a fascinating album in terms of its production and behind-the-scenes revelations but even more so from a musical perspective. The rumours and explosions might have salivated the mouths of the press but the band were keen to bridge the divided and come together to create a truly wonderful album. That is exactly what they did in 1976. When the album was released a year later, contemporary critics were raving. They noted how the music was directly propelled by inner-turmoils and romantic entanglements. As I said, most bands would be unable to separate life from art whereas Fleetwood Mac were all too aware of the reality of their situations but used it to create some of the finest music of the 1970s. It is radio-friendly and shiny; it has gloss and immaculate production but plenty of emotions and contradictions. The vocals, especially from Stevie Nicks, range from wailing and harrowed to sensual and alluring, whereas the compositions and song structures are immaculate. There is not a song immune from high praise and the album is an extraordinary testament to a group of musicians who found love and common ground in the middle of divorced relations and drug-filled chaos. I don’t understand why as yet why has nobody made a film/drama about FleetwoodMac’s astonishing story?! Magazines, websites and music fans constantly place Rumours near the (or at) the top of their greatest albums polls. Musicians around the world have been inspired by the music and continue to source it forty years down the line. There are few albums as long-lasting as Fleetwood Mac’s masterpiece. It is a wonderful record .
Nashville singer-songwriter and producer Michael Stovall has been making a name for himself in the music world for nearly a decade. In 2014, he released his first solo album, Georgia, just months before relocating to Nashville. Since then, he’s focused his time on producing great local music, including a new project of his own. Under the moniker Red Porch Kid, Stovall has crafted an album completely on his own. “Rocketship”, sneaked out this January, was mixed, mastered, produced and recorded in his one bedroom apartment earlier this year.
In his Words: “‘Waitin’ on Something’ was one of the first songs I wrote for the record, and it sorta ended up being the cornerstone for the entire album. Usually I don’t enjoy listening back to the songs that I’ve written and recorded, but I don’t mind listening to this one if it comes on.” comments Michael Stovall. while Good Heart was a song that happened pretty quickly,” Stovall tells. “I was thinking about how different experiences or relationships can often end pretty quickly, but neither side is really to blame. It doesn’t make you a bad person if you lose touch with someone, we’re all human beings. Sometimes things just end, and it’s ok to move on with your life.”
A new music video for “Dry Town (Demo)” from Boots No 1: The Official Revival Bootleg watch the delightfully animated film using good old fashioned stop motion, a few plastic dolls and some anthropomorphized shot glasses, created by artist Rachel Blumberg.
‘Dry Town’ came from a live experience I had on a road trip when I was just out of college,” says Welch “David and I wrote the song shortly after moving to Nashville, after a show where we opened for Johnny Cash. We were so inspired to meet Johnny and see him in the flesh that we wanted to capture some of that narrative swagger and humor in a song of our own. Since the story is front and center, it seemed like a great chance to bring the song to life with stop motion animation.”
Welch said she gave the toy ’71 Buick featured prominently in the video to animator Rachel Blumberg (a former drummer for The Decemberists and Bright Eyes). It soon became the foundation for the video’s whole aesthetic.
“Gillian had seen [the stop motion sketch comedy] Robot Chicken recently and thusly had the idea in her head of using action figures to tell the story in the song,” says Blumberg. “There were a lot of moments when I was inspired by the rhythm of a line, from the phrasing and melody, about how the characters should move, or what little moment was happening. Besides the music, the lyrics have a great visual quality and rhythm and it made sense to interpret things in a very literal way, which I think adds to the humor of the piece.”
“Dry Town (Demo)” is from Gillian Welch’s Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg,
New album ‘Boots No. 1 – The Official Revival Bootleg’ out now
“To me, euphoria lives inside an electric guitar,”says Chris Stamey of his new Yep Roc release. “That’s a place I find freedom, passion, exhilaration: in the spaces between the notes, in the distance between the frets.”
“Euphoria” is a distinctly compelling entry in a body of work that already contains a startling amount of acknowledged classics and underappreciated gems. As solo artist and founding co-frontman of the seminal indie combo The dB’s, the North Carolina-bred singer-songwriter-guitarist has built a beloved and influential catalogue that’s earned him a devoted international fan base and established him as a godfather to the Southern alternative pop community.
Arriving on the heels of his widely acclaimed 2013 chamber-pop excursion Lovesick Blues and 2012’s long-awaited dB’s reunion album Falling Off the Sky, Euphoria finds Chris Stamey embracing his electric roots with an emotionally resonant set of rocking, melodically infectious, sonically bracing new tunes, with expansive arrangements incorporating horns and other unexpected sonic textures, and a supporting cast that includes Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub, Pat Sansone of Wilco, Django Haskins of the Old Ceremony and longtime cohort Mitch Easter.
“I found these songs inside the same dilapidated old Silvertone lipstick guitar that I’d written my first records on,” Stamey asserts. “Maybe that’s why it sounds a bit like those records in some ways.”
While Euphoria‘s songs carry echoes of Stamey’s earliest work, they also explore some unfamiliar sonic and compositional territory. “The songs sound simple, but I’ve been listening to Gershwin and Cole Porter, and trying to use chord changes in places where, on other records, I might have used echo or mixing tricks,” he says. “On songs like ‘Where Does the Time Go?’ and ‘Make Up Your Mind,’ it seems like the parts repeat, but actually they’re shifting around all the time, with little modulations and variations. I’m finding new places to go.”
In addition to Stamey’s own memorable compositions, Euphoria‘s highlights include the rousing opening track “Universe-sized Arms,” a previously unreleased Ryan Adams composition that Adams suggested he record.
While the heartfelt “You Are Beautiful” ranks with Stamey’s finest ballads and “When the Fever Breaks” is one of his punchiest rockers, the propulsive “Rocketship” offers a tip of the hat to legendary punk progenitors the MC5, whose 1971 visit to Stamey’s hometown of Winston-Salem was a seminal event in the lives of those who witnessed it.
“I’ve grown very fond of the last several Wes Anderson movies,” Stamey notes. “I love how handmade and ‘auteur’ they look, and I wanted to make a record that sounded a bit like that. At the same time, my teenage daughter got a turntable and regularly spun some of the Beatles’ records, including Rubber Soul and Revolver, albums that I’d not paid much attention to when I was growing up but that now drew me in.
“That sound—of a few musicians working up a song and playing it together, leaving a little room for George Martin-isms to fill in the gaps—was very appealing to me,” he continues. “I liked how funky and natural it all sounded. A lot of modern records sound like they’re made by people wearing new, shiny clothes who are scripting in car crashes and Marvel superheroes and the Perfect Snare. But I wanted a T-shirt sound.”
To that end, Stamey assembled some longtime friends from Chapel Hill’s fertile musical community—Tony Stiglitz, F.J. Ventre, Wes Lachot, Matt McMichaels and producer Jeff Crawford—and did some literal woodshedding.
“We started rehearsing in a tiny old shack out in the woods, and I wrote some new songs so we’d have something to play together,” Stamey recalls. “Then we ran down the road to Mitch Easter’s Fidelitorium studio to cut tracks together as a band, with Mitch on guitar as well.”
Having already explored the possibilities of string and woodwind arrangements on Lovesick Blues, Stamey, using the Beatles’ Revolver as his inspiration, incorporates a horn section—including members of New York’s legendary Uptown Horns—throughout Euphoria, along with some “Tomorrow Never Knows”-style loops on the album’s title track. The latter element was drawn partially from a woodwind piece that Stamey wrote in his youth. That composition, like several other early classical pieces he’d written, was long thought to have been accidentally destroyed, but a recording of it resurfaced last year at the tail end of the master tape of the dB’s’ 1978 debut single “If and When.”
Euphoria‘s birth cycle also found Stamey reacquainting himself with another early source of inspiration. “I was joyfully reunited with my old family piano, a Steinway baby grand that I’d first played when I was six,” he explains. “‘Make Up Your Mind’ and ‘Where Does the Time Go?’ both came from this beloved instrument.”
For the wistful, bittersweet “Invisible,” Stamey, seeking to capture a classic Winston-Salem sound, reunited Easter and Let’s Active drummer Eric Marshall, with Stamey playing bass.
The sense of discovery and adventure that energizes Euphoria is a consistent thread that runs through Stamey’s expansive catalog, which he began assembling while making avant-garde home-recording experiments in his teens. Those early efforts set the stage for obscure, but ultimately influential, independent releases with his early outfits Rittenhouse Square (with his future dB’s bandmate Peter Holsapple) and Sneakers (including dB Will Rigby and future Let’s Active leader Mitch Easter).
Moving to New York at the dawn of the ’80s, Stamey launched his own pioneering indie label, Car Records, and he played bass in Alex Chilton’s band, before making a pair of now-classic albums, 1981’s Stands for deciBels and 1982’s Repercussion, with The dB’s. He then began turning out a series of personally charged, musically adventurous gems including It’s A Wonderful Life, Instant Excitement, It’s Alright, Fireworks, his 2004 Yep Roc debut Travels in the South and the holiday-themed Christmas Time.
The Stamey oeuvre also includes a pair of duo albums with Peter Holsapple, Mavericks and Here and Now, and A Question of Temperature, on which he was backed by Yo La Tengo. He’s also worked as a sideman with the likes of Bob Mould and the Golden Palominos.
Stamey has also produced and recorded a wide variety of artists at Modern Recording, the Chapel Hill studio that he’s operated for the past two decades, including recordings by the likes of Whiskeytown, Alejandro Escovedo, Flat Duo Jets, Le Tigre and Tift Merritt.
Since 2010, Stamey has also been the musical director and orchestrator for a series of all-star international concert performances of Big Star’s classic album Sister Lovers aka Third, with a rotating musical cast that includes BigStar’s Jody Stephens as well as members of the Posies, R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub, Wilco and Yo La Tengo.
Prestigious as Stamey’s resume is, Euphoria makes it clear that the veteran artist is presently making some of the most vital and expressive music of his career.
“A lot of people who’ve heard this album have expressed the opinion that it’s very much a Winston-Salem album, and I can definitely hear that,” Stamey says, adding, “To me, these songs really lend themselves to be played live, and I’m really looking forward to doing that.”
Nick Allbrook’s Pond, who predates Tame Impala by a few years, is greeting 2017 with new album release TheWeather, its their 7th full-length album since their genesis in 2008. Similar to Tame Impala’s veering path with Currents and weirdo godfathers The Flaming Lips’ transition into The Soft Bulletin, Pond are putting their guitars down and reaching for the synths. With Kevin Parker at the helm in the studio, however, their electronic impulses are taking them to new and interesting psychedelic heights. Singles “30000 Megatons” and “Sweep Me Off My Feet”embrace both pop and avant garde, a daring Bowie-esque move that’s opened their doors for experimentation wide open.
Rough Trade has a limited ‘white with blue specs’ variant across the ocean, so if you dig that kind of thing, head on over and grab one. POND’s unbridled creativity has seen them push the boundaries of psychedelic-rock and on their forthcoming album The Weather, the Perth based four-piece have created their most sharp and focussed record to date.
