Best known as the singer of the Hold Steady, Craig Finn is a Minnesota-bred singer, songwriter, and guitarist based out of New York City. Combining literary influences like Jack Kerouac and John Berryman with the musical influences of Bruce Springsteen and fellow Minnesotan Paul Westerberg, Finn’s highly descriptive lyrical style has a strong focus on narrative, crafting whole worlds for the people in his songs to exist within.
‘A Legacy of Rental’s’, is the 6th solo record from Finn, was produced by Josh Kaufman and recorded by D. James Goodwin at The Clubhouse recording studio. Compared to past solo releases, this collection was recorded with the help of a 14-piece string section including violins, violas and cellos, instead of the usually horn-heavy sounds that Craig and The Hold Steady are known for. The themes of the record explore memory, how we remember our loved ones, the places in our lives that have changed, and recent events that are part of our past.
Very pleased to announce Craig Finn and The Uptown Controllers will be returning to Europe and the UK for dates this Fall in support of my new record A LEGACY OF RENTALS. We’ll start in Denmark and make our way to the UK and Ireland. It’s our first trip over since 2019 and we are excited to share new and old songs with you.
A member of both the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Laura Nyro not only wrote songs that became hits for acts including The 5th Dimension, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand, and many more, but has been cited as a major influence by Kate Bush, Elton John, Elvis Costello, Cyndi Lauper, Todd Rundgren and countless others. She recorded 10 studio albums (one released posthumously), but a live performance was always an event. Originally issued only in Japan in 2003, the 16 tracks recorded at Kintetsu Hall, plus five recorded at “On Air West” return as “Trees Of The Ages: Laura Nyro Live In Japan“. It runs the gamut of her career, from Nyro-penned hits including “And When I Die”, “Wedding Bell Blues“, and “Save The Country”, to covers of Bacharach/David, Smokey Robinson, and Phil Spector classics.”
1994 live performance includes the classics “And When I Die,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Stoned Soul Picnic,” and more.
A member of both the Songwriters and Rock & Roll Halls of Fame, Laura Nyro not only wrote songs that became hits for acts including The 5th Dimension, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand, and many more, but has been cited as a major influence by Kate Bush, Elton John, Elvis Costello, Cyndi Lauper, Todd Rundgren, Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Wicked), and countless others. She recorded 10 studio albums (one released posthumously), but a live performance from Nyro was always an event.
Originally issued only in Japan as “Live In Japan” in 2003, these 16 tracks recorded at Kintetsu Hall, plus 5 recorded at On Air West return as “Trees Of The Ages: Laura Nyro Live In Japan”. From Nyro-penned hits including “And When I Die,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” and “Save The Country,” to covers of Bacharach/David, Smokey Robinson, and Phil Spector classics, “Trees Of The Ages” is an essential document of Laura’s February 1994 historic visit to Japan. With Laura on piano and vocals, with harmonies by Diane Wilson, Dian Sorrell, Diane Garisto, the performances are sublime.
Newly remastered by Grammy®-winner Michael Graves, and produced for release by Grammy®-winner Cheryl Pawelski and George Gilbert with the approval of The Laura Nyro Trust, the packaging contains updated artwork and new liner notes from author and musician John Kruth. Looking and sounding incredible, this essential addition to Nyro’s discography is available worldwide for the first time. “Trees Of The Ages: Laura Nyro Live In Japan” cements the legend of the incomparable Laura Nyro.
The title of The Stroppies’ newest LP, “Levity”, serves as a creative statement of intent and an acknowledgment of the dichotomy between the music they have made and the conditions in which they were produced. For a group that started over an initial idea to “create open ended music, quickly and haphazardly”, the logistical challenges of creating their second album in the midst of a pandemic, in a city that endured the longest lockdown in the world, created a need to redefine process.
“Levity”, The Stroppies strongest creative statement to date, is the result of this new approach to creative process. Playful yet focused, but broader in scope and experimentation than previous efforts, the ten songs that comprise Levity continue the band’s exploration of the pop song as both foil for experimentation and conduit for personal reflection.
Whereas the group’s debut LP “Whoosh!” demonstrated their ability to craft clean, concise jangle pop, “Levity” takes a different route by utilizing a darker pallet of sounds to create its impressionistic whole. Fuzz and distortion are employed to add weight to songs built on tape loops and Motorik drum patterns. Warbling synthesisers and modulated keys add new moods and dimensions to The Stroppies unique brand of pop classicism. Thematically, the band continues their exploration of the personal refracted through the lens of the absurd, though this time around the music feels a few shades darker, a somewhat inevitable consequence of the collective trauma of the past 24 months. The songs still hit with the immediacy that made their debut so engaging, but there’s a creeping cynicism and wistfulness that now permeates The Stroppies sound.
While the narrative around the ‘lockdown record’ is increasingly commonplace, there are unavoidable realities involved in making creative decisions under such circumstances that can’t be overlooked, especially for a band that thrives on collaboration. “The restrictions around COVID really informed the way we made the record’, says Angus Lord, the band’s co-founder and guitarist. “There was a lot less opportunity to meet and build ideas collaboratively, which is how we’ve worked in the past. Instead, ideas were developed in isolation, then shared digitally, developing slowly over correspondence and only bearing fruit when we were able to be in a room together. I think this had a big effect on the song writing and execution.” adds drummer Rory Heane .
This process even extended to the studio, where TheStroppies found a kindred spirit in John Lee of Phaedra Studios, who mixed the record in isolation, somehow managing to synthesise the band’s pop sensibilities with their penchant for studio experimentation. Furthermore, the addition of new member Zoe Monk to the , known for playing in a diverse array of Melbourne acts (Eggy, Thibault, The Opals) contributed both synthesiser experimentation and a rock solid rhythm guitar style, a huge addition to the band’s developing sound, an infectious combination of the off-kilter 90s US underground, British artpunk ala Wire and a more than generous love of classic Pop song writing. Reflecting on the making of the record, bassist and co-vocalist Claudia Serfaty understands their shift in approach, noting that, “the world feels strange and in turn making pop music feels even stranger. A healthy dose of levity had to be employed in order to find meaning in the process.” In spite of this light hearted attitude, The Stroppies have managed to craft a record of weight and substance.
Through “Levity”the Stroppies have, at least temporarily, found their feet amongst the chaos.
On 6th May, we will be releasing the second long player by Melbourne-based four piece, The Stroppies. Recorded at the start of 2022, “Levity” finds the band tackling life in the most locked-down city in the world with their now characteristic brand of whimsical odd-pop brilliance. Watch the band directed videofor lead single, “The Perfect Crime”.
As well as CD and digital versions, “Levity” will be released on a few different vinyl formats – a standard black pressing, a transparent edition, and, much like with previous records “Whoosh” and “Look Alive”, a very limited white vinyl pressing with a bonus secret 7″. The latter will be exclusively available via Bandcamp, the Tough Love online shop and Rough Trade.
The Stroppies tour the UK with Paul Weller in April, and will also be playing two headline shows in Glasgow and London.
When one of your favourite bands returns after a longer break mixed feelings are natural as you approach the new material. I’ve been through all stages of love with Editors throughout the past 17 years; they partly also lost me, only to triumphantly win me back later. Now, a seventh studio album is approaching and “Heart Attack” is the first teaser from it and also the start of a new chapter. The band now added a sixth(!) member – electronic wizard Benjamin John Power, better known under his alias Blanck Mass – to the line-up. And while one could argue why it had to be another middle-aged man, that also appears to be quite logical since Power was already heavily involved with 2018’s “Violence” album. But it also means that we’re not getting rid of the slightly cinematic over-the-top version of Editors anytime soon.
“Heart Attack” is a pumping goth pop anthem with industrial influences and while it might appear strange at first it actually grew on me with every listening experience. That final minute is especially nice. A friend of mine said the chorus sounded a bit like A-ha and I can’t unhear it ever since. I’m still on board … for the moment but we’ll have to see what the future will bring for these guys.
We’re also really pleased to announce Ivor Novello winning producer, composer and long time friend, Benjamin John Power, aka Blanck Mass, is joining the band as a full time member and will be playing live with us from the Autumn onwards.
The setting for the magnificent new album by The Delines, “The Sea Drift,” named after one of those run-down motels along Route 82 from Tallahassee to Houston. The album’s first two lines are, “Little Earl is driving down the Gulf Coast / Sitting on a pillow so he can see the road.” Like the opening of a Raymond Carver short story, this gets us asking questions: “Who is Little Earl, and why does he need a pillow to see over the steering wheel?” Why does the passenger seat hold three frozen pizzas, two cigarette lighters and a 12-pack of beer?
The answer comes in the second stanza: “Little Earl’s brother is bleeding in the backseat.” The owner of the convenience store where the siblings grabbed the beer and pizza had a gun. Now they’re driving the car they “borrowed” from their uncle past “the houses on stilts on Holly Beach,” looking for a hospital without a map or a clue. Soon the horns and organs are rising through the third verse like the panic in Earl’s throat.
What’s remarkable about this song and the album that follows is this: The Delines live up in Portland,Oregon, far from Holly Beach, Louisiana. Willy Vlautin, the band’s songwriter and guitarist, grew up in Reno before moving to Portland, and the band’s singer, Amy Boone, grew up near Albany, Santa Fe and Austin. But in Holly Beach, a town demolished again and again by hurricanes, only to rebound, they have found the perfect locale for their songs about the precariousness of life in 21st-century America. And the perfect soundtrack, for the Gulf Coast’s country-soul coats these patient story songs like the humidity on its tank-top-clad characters.
“Willy and I both come from working-class backgrounds,” Boone says. “These characters are people we grew up with, worked with and went to school with. He and I talk a lot about our childhoods, and they’re a lot the same even though they’re geographically distant. Reno, upstate New York and Holly Beach are a lot the same; they have the same pop culture, the same kind of working-class families with the same kind of child raising. There were crazy times in our childhoods, things we maybe shouldn’t have been exposed to, but we found out about the world for ourselves.”
“I lived with my single mom and my brother until my mom’s boyfriend moved in when I was 12,” adds Vlautin. “When I was 15, 16, I started realizing how many grifters and lost men were living in Reno. I was scared of them and attracted to them at the same time. I drank that romantic Kool Aid that that was a cool way to live—and I sort of believed I was headed that way anyway. I was reading a lot of John Steinbeck and listening to Springsteen, Tom Waits and Willie Nelson.”
The Delines grew out of two rocking, Americana bands that had reached the end of the line around 2012. Vlautin and drummer Sean Oldham had been in the Portland band Richmond Fontaine, which had released 14 albums since 1996. Boone and her sister Deborah Kelly were co-leaders of the Austin band The Damnations, which released three albums over the same period.
The break-ups were all amicable, but Vlautin and Boone were approaching 50, and they wanted to make some music that took its time to tell a story and to savour the atmosphere. As role models, they looked to their favourite Gulf Coast songwriters: Louisiana’s Tony Joe White, Mississippi’s Bobbie Gentry and Texas’s Gatemouth Brown. The grooves are relaxed but seductive, the harmonies steamy, and the stories too true to be cheerful. Holding it all together are the arrangements of The Delines’ keyboardist-trumpeter Cory Gray.
“It feels easy on my ears to not be in a loud, crazy band,” admits Boone. “It seems more age-appropriate, right for where we are in our lives. Our music is described as romantic, but there’s this dark underbelly. It’s a little confusing how the topics and the music fit together, but it comes out feeling beautifully tragic. That’s thanks to Cory; he’s a cornucopia of influences. Just calling them sad songs is not giving them enough credit. There’s a lot more going on. These are people in tough spots trying to work it out. That doesn’t mean they don’t get out of it.”
“Amy has that Gulf Coast feel to her singing,” Vlautin points out, “and she was really interested in that vibe for this record. I was, too. She and I could listen to Tony Joe’s ‘Rainy Night in Georgia’ three hours a day. She said, ‘Why don’t you write me a ‘Rainy Night in Georgia?’ It was fun for me to try to write something with that kind of groove and that kind of feel. Some of the songs I bring don’t work for her; they’re too raw. So I try to write some romantic tunes for her, which is great, because my voice could never pull them off. For every romantic tune I write for her, I get a ‘Little Earl.’”
One such romantic song is “Past the Shadows,” whose melody seems to swoon before perking up again at the end of each line. As Boone stretches out her syllables over Vlautin’s clipped guitar and Gray’s sumptuous horns, she describes a room at the Sea Drift Motel, where the drapes are drawn, the lights are off and “all you can see is you and me in the darkness … That’s when I feel safe.”
But for most of the songs, Vlautin has written a female character who’s trapped in a bad relationship and is trying to find a safe off-ramp. In “Drowning in Plain Sight,” it’s a woman who’s willing to let her husband’s beer and her kids’ ice cream get warm, because she needs some time to herself. So she keeps driving past the marinas outside of town, disappearing into the haze of lazy horns.
In “All Along the Ride,” she’s in the passenger seat, next to her man, suffocating in a silence as haunting as the pauses between Gray’s piano chords, as final as the Primadonna Club when it closed for good. She’d like to pretend it doesn’t hurt; she “could lie and say I’d get a thicker skin, but I’ve been trying my whole life to get a thicker skin.”
In “This Ain’t No Getaway,” she’s coming back to the apartment at six in the morning to get the boxes of her belongings, bracing herself against her man’s glare and his loaded .38 on the TV set. Over the push-and-pull ballad groove and the reverb-heavy guitar chords, she sings, “My sister warned me not to come, but I ain’t giving anything else away.”
“She’s terrified of this guy,” Vlautin says of the latter character, “but she’s tired of being terrified. She doesn’t care if the cops come or if he kills her. I’ve never been a woman in that situation, but I’ve been in situations where I’ve been really scared like that. And I’ve learned that sometimes you have to stand your ground if you’re going to retain who you are. It’s a good song for Amy to sing, because this woman is really tough, and she decides, ‘I’m not going to spend my life being scared.’”
Vlautin he works on writing his novels as well as his songs. His published five novels so far, and two of them have been turned into movies, most notably 2017’s “Lean on Pete“, starring Charlie Plummer, Amy Seimetz, Steve Buscemi, Steve Zahn and Chloe Sevigny. Like his songs, Vlautin’s fiction centers on working-class characters caught in difficult circumstances, not entirely of their own making. From his office window, he reports, he can see a bar and a clump of guys on the sidewalk, taking a cigarette break from drinking.
“During the summer,” he remembers, “I’d work with a lot of vagrant guys who had already failed in life, and I felt maybe I was headed in the same direction. Why not jump into it right away? Like getting a tooth pulled, you want to get it over with. But then you’re sitting in a bar next to a guy who’s 50, and you realize you don’t want to end up that way. What saved me was I loved records so much that I wanted really bad to be in a band. I got so much comfort from books and records as a kid that I wanted to be a part of that.”
His older brother John, who wrote folk songs, said, “You’re so sad, you should write songs.” The younger brother started at age 11 and never stopped, even though he wasn’t happy with anything he wrote till he turned 27. He started writing novels at 17, though he didn’t publish one until he was 39. He kept at it, however, and finally realized he had to get out of Reno if was ever going to find an audience. He tried Denver but wound up in Portland before he was 30. He spent a year there loading trucks before he formed Richmond Fontaine.
The band didn’t make much sense geographically. They were based in Oregon, but sounded like such Southwest bands as Rank & File or The Blasters. But they never found much popularity in any corner of North America; instead, they became very popular in England and then northern Europe.
Meanwhile, Boone and her sister Deborah Kelly (two years older, she uses their mom’s maiden name while Boone uses her mom’s married name) had moved from rural New York State to New Mexico and after high school to Austin. With drummer Keith Langford (later of The Gourds) and guitarist Rob Bernard (later Kelly’s husband), they formed the jangly, country-rock band The Damnations. Their debut studio album, 1998’s “Half Mad Moon“, was re-released by a major label, SireRecords.
When The Damnations opened for Richmond Fontaine on a West Coast tour, the two groups bonded. Vlautin asked Kelly to sing a duet with him on the title track from the Fontaines 2003 album “Post to Wire”. In 2011, he asked her to join Richmond Fontaine for a European tour, but she had just become pregnant, so she couldn’t go. So she recommended that her sister take her place. And when Vlautin heard Boone singing a piano ballad at a radio station one day, he realized she had a voice that he could write for.
“As you get older,” he says, “you have to chase dreams like this; you can’t put them off till the right time. So I went home and wrote seven songs for Amy, plus a long letter on why she should waste her time with me. I told her I didn’t want to do a rock band; I didn’t want to lean on the ‘boom-de-chick-de boom.’ I wanted to do a ballad band with story songs. She liked three of the songs right off the bat, so she came up to Portland to rehearse, and we recorded the first Delines album, “Colfax.”
“I still have the letter,” Boone adds. “I was surprised, but I was really excited. I felt incredibly insecure. I had never thought of myself as a singer; I was a singer as a default, because who else was going to sing the songs I was writing? But Willy’s songs were so good, I didn’t want to mess them up. You can mess up your own songs, but you don’t want to mess up someone else’s.”
Jenny Conlee played keyboards on “Colfax”, but when it came time to tour, she had to return to her regular job with Portland’s Decemberists. She was replaced by Gray, whose responsibilities have grown to the point where he composed two instrumentals for the new album, mixing Miles Davis trumpet with Brian Wilson keyboards. Drummer Oldham and bassist Freddy Trujillo fill out the line-up.
Gray’s contributions to the second studio album, 2019’s “The Imperial“, hinted at the Gulf Coast sound of this year’s “The Sea Drift“. The completion of “The Imperial” was delayed when a car hit Boone when she was walking down a sidewalk, leading to multiple years of recovery. The completion of “The Sea Drift” was delayed by the pandemic.
But now it’s here, and it demonstrates the value of breaking up the phrase “singer/songwriter” into its two halves. Just as Robbie Robertson wrote lyrics for Levon Helm, just as Robert Hunter did the same for Jerry Garcia, so has Vlautin penned his best work for Boone. No longer hemmed in by the limitations of his own voice, Vlautin can range wider both in pitch and psychology. With more distance from his protagonists, he can bring a new perspective to his material.
“I was never that great a frontman,” he admits. “By stepping back and letting Amy do it, that took the handcuffs off me as a songwriter, took the blinders off. It’s really fun to write these tunes thinking about her singing them. Both her voice and her personality are the same: really sweet but world-weary, too, and she’s really smart, and all of that comes through in her voice.”
“Because he’s a novelist,” Boone adds, “his songs unfold in short-story form. They don’t always end, sometimes you just get a portion of a story. So I feel like I’m a storyteller as much as a singer. I think it’s interesting to sing about people at the margins of society. I like diving into the characters and bringing them to life, not by any vocal calisthenics, but by the way I deliver the songs.”
The album features the classic line-up of the band with Amy Boone (vocals), Willy Vlautin (guitars, vocals, songwriting), Freddy Trujillo (bass), Sean Oldham (drums, vocals) and Cory Gray (keyboards, trumpet and arrangements) doing some of their finest work yet. Willy Vlautin has just published his sixth novel and there will be more reissues of their previous band, Richmond Fontaine in later 2022.
Please note the sticker says 180gm but all the stock on the limited edition is 140gm. ‘Hold Me Slow’ is only on bonus compact disc and not on the vinyl. From their new album ‘The Sea Drift’, out now.
New York filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is no stranger to working with musicians, whether it’s been with his documentaries about The Stooges and Neil Young, or casting the likes of Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, multiple Wu-Tang Clan members and Iggy Pop in his movies. He’s also directed music videos for Talking Heads, Big Audio Dynamite and The Raconteurs. Now, Cat Power (aka singer/songwriter Chan Marshall) has joined that group of heavyweights, sharing the Jarmusch-directed video for her cover of The Pogues’ “A Pair Of Brown Eyes.”
Cat Power’s version of the song, which originally appeared on the band’s 1985 album “Rum Sodomy & TheLash”, comes from her most recent album “Covers”, which came out this past January, and swaps ThePogues’ guitar-and-accordian backing with layers of harmonies, mellotron and minimal percussion. The video matches the stark difference in instrumentation to a T, placing the singer and her mellotron in a cloud of white fog, and mirroring the ethereal quality she brings to the track.
“As someone who deeply loves Cat Power’s music, getting to collaborate with Chan on this video was like a dream come true,” Jarmusch said in a statement. “She’s so inspiring to me, of course as an artist, but she’s also just such an extraordinary person.”
Cat Power is currently on tour, playing dates across the U.S. and Europe, She’s also added new North American dates throughout the summer.
Anton Newcombe frontman, songwriter, composer, studio owner, multi-instrumentalist, producer, engineer, force of nature – returns with the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 19th full-length studio album “Fire Doesn’t Grow On Trees”, released on 24th June 2022 on his own label A Recordings.
It is 30 years since the release of their first single “She Made Me / Evergreen”. Released in 1992, as the British music press descended on the US to anoint the next great US guitar band as the flavour of the month, Anton Newcombe had an idea: say no. As leader of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Newcombe had already established himself as a visionary songwriter, a man to whom making music wasn’t a lifestyle choice or a hipster haircut but the very fabric of existence itself, and he had observed in silent horror as his peers meekly acquiesced to everything. But he was different. Anton Newcombe was going to say no to everything. “I just knew I would be more successful in a certain way by saying no, just being contrary because I figured that if people liked me they were gonna like me anyway,” he says. “Or dislike me. It doesn’t matter.”
Brian Jonestown Massacre’s shoegazing-tinged debut classic album “Methodrone” was released in 1995 and since then numerous band members have joined Newcombe on his sonic escapades, but he has remained the sole constant, the creative mastermind at the centre of one of music’s most fascinating bands. There has been a further 18 albums under the Brian Jonestown Massacre since then, each embarking on their own mind-expanding adventure and exploring the outer realms of rock’n’roll; psychedelic rock, country-blues, snarling rock’n’roll, blissed-out noise-pop and more.
Along the way, Newcombe has established himself as a once-in-a-lifetime talent who saw the direction in which mainstream indie-rock was heading and opted to take the long way round. He’s emerged as a revolutionary force in modern music, an underground hero. There was no other way, this was how it had to be.“My only option with everything in life has always been that you just jump into the fire,” he declares. “It doesn’t matter what it is.”
He’s hopped around the globe, from the West Coast to New York, from Manhattan to Iceland, and then to Berlin, where he’s lived for 14 years and has two flats, one to live in and one that’s been converted into his studio. He goes there six days a week to work and write and record and produce and it’s where the fantastic new BJM album “Fire Doesn’t Grow On Trees” was made. In an era where one band bleeds into the next and production all seems to be pulling from a similarly beige-y sonic palette, here is a record that crackles with excitement and possibility, the fuzz of those 60s Ampeg amps, the exhilarating swirl of guitars and keyboards and Newcombe conducting the chaos.
“Fire Doesn’t Grow On Trees” is the beginning of a thrilling new phase for Newcombe and his band. Joining him in the studio for this album were Ricky Maymi (guitars), Ryan Carlson Van Kriedt (keyboards), Hakon Adalsteinsson (guitar), Hallberg Daði Hallbergsson (bass), Uri Rennert (drums) and Sara Neidorf (drums).
After a hugely prolific 2010s that saw the release of eight long-players and one mini-album, Newcombe had been going through a period of writer’s block when one day he picked up his 12-string guitar in the studio and album opener and lead single “The Real” came out of him. Like the kraken, it was as if he’d summoned it.“All of a sudden, I just heard something,” he says. “And then it just didn’t stop. We tracked a whole song every single day for 70 days in a row.”
Four minutes into “Fire Doesn’t Grow On Trees”, there are two lines that sum up its fearless spirit. “Fight the beast until it dies, raise your sword up to the sky!”, sings Newcombe as an explosion of fuzzy guitars, thrumming organs and rolling drums collide around him. As soon as Newcombe wrote it, he knew “The Real” had to open the new album. “That line is like fantasyland!” he laughs. “It’s the little kid in me, full on St George shit. It’s as much a declaration of anything that I could ever muster. A lot of the album is about the affirmation by just living. Existentially, this time period, has felt pretty dark so it’s about fighting the good fight. I’m singing to empower other people.
These are songs fuelled with the heady feeling of capturing a moment – from the hot-footed country sway of “It’s About Being Free” Really to the hazy grooves of “What’s In A Name“, from the garage stomp of “Silenced” to the widescreen 60s-pop of “Wait A Minute” (2:30 To Be Exact). Nothing was pre-written. Like “The Real”, everything was conjured up by where an instrument took Newcombe when he picked it up. “I could sit at the piano, the organ, any instrument, and get an idea all of a sudden. I would play for one second with the band to get a grasp of the idea, and then we would unplug the amps and put on the headphones, plug in and track it. Then I would go, ‘guys leave the room’, sing the words in my head and then record them.
“Fire Doesn’t Grow On Trees” is a brilliant album, but there is no such thing as a defining statement in Anton Newcombe’s world anymore, just more chapters that contribute to the tale. “Nobody can stop me, I’m not asking somebody, I’m not making the rounds at Warners, saying ‘please put out my record!’. It’s just for me,” he says. He hopes he can be an inspiration to others. “I would love to see more groups, people playing music in the UK and everywhere else because I really enjoy it. That’s the only reason I need. It’s the only reason to do stuff.” That hits to the core of what makes Anton Newcombe and Brian Jonestown Massacre tick in 2022.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre are currently on a 38-date tour of the US and will be announcing a European tour soon.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre will release Fire Doesn’t Grow On Trees, their nineteenth album, on June 24 via founder Anton Newcombe’s A Recordings. This is the BJM’s first album in three years, a long time for the very prolific group, though Anton regularly shares work-in-progress songs via his YouTube channel.
“The Real,” which opens the album, was the first song he composed after period of writer’s block. “All of a sudden, I just heard something,” Anton says. “And then it just didn’t stop. We tracked a whole song every single day for 70 days in a row.” He also says he knew “The Real” had to be the first song when he wrote the lyric “Fight the beast until it dies, raise your sword up to the sky.” “That line is like fantasyland! It’s the little kid in me, full on St. George shit. It’s as much a declaration of anything that I could ever muster. A lot of the album is about affirmation by just living. Existentially, this time period has felt pretty dark, so it’s about fighting the good fight. I’m singing to empower other people.
First of all, I’m getting whatever I need out of it, but I can see it as something other people can identify with.”
With its swirling organs and crashing drums “The Real” is some Grade-A BJM-style psych. You can listen to that and its b-side, the dreamy “Where Do We Go From Here?,”
We cannot wait for Record Store Day 2022, the party that’s become the Largest Single Day Music Event in The World. In celebration of the 15th annual celebration, we are thrilled to announce the “L.A. Woman Sessions“, which is being released as a limited-edition 4-LP set on April 23rd.
On a slate chalk board, Jim wrote the words “A Clean Slate,” as to define the moment.
Hear the progression of each song on “L.A. Woman” as it developed in the studio. Includes the original demo of “Riders On The Storm” newly remixed from the original multitrack session tapes. Previously only available on CD as part of the “L.A. Woman 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition“.
The Doors had crammed several lifetimes into just five years as band, and by late 1970, the psychic toll of Jim Morrison’s addiction and legal hassles threatened to overwhelm the group. Any attempts at making an album under these conditions should have met with unmitigated disaster, but on “L.A. Woman” the final Doors LP released during Morrison’s lifetime the band succeeded almost in spite of themselves. Self-produced and recorded in their private rehearsal space, the album was a homecoming in both a musical and spiritual sense. “Our last record turned out like our first album: raw and simple,” drummer John Densmore reflected in his autobiography. “It was as if we had come full circle. Once again we were a garage band, which is where rock & roll started.”
Morrison left on an extended trip to Paris as the final mixes were being prepared, hoping to rediscover his muse in the City of Light. He would never return: The singer died there in July 1971. As his final recorded work with the Doors turns 45, here are some surprising facts about the creation of “L.A. Woman“.
“L. A. Woman” got off to an inauspicious start in November 1970, when the band played their new material for producer Paul Rothchild. They possessed only a handful of semi-complete tunes, and Rothchild was less than impressed. He dismissed “Riders on the Storm” as “cocktail music,” but reserved particular scorn for “Love Her Madly,” which he cited as the song that drove him out of the studio. “The material was bad, the attitude was bad, the performance was bad,” he said in the Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive. “After three days of listening I said, ‘That’s it!’ on the talk-back and cancelled the session.”
They convened for an emergency meeting at a nearby Chinese restaurant, and Rothchild laid his cards on the table. “I said, ‘Look, I think it sucks. I don’t think the world wants to hear it. It’s the first time I’ve ever been bored in a recording studio in my life. I want to go to sleep.’” With that, the so-called “Fifth Door,” who had produced the band since their debut, walked out. Once the shock had worn off, the Doors turned to engineer Bruce Botnick, whose credits included all of their previous albums, as well as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed. With his help, the reinvigorated band vowed to coproduce their new album. Gone were the days of Rothchild’s studio strictness, where it was normal to record 30 takes or spend hours on perfecting a drum sound. “Rothchild was gone, which is one reason why we had so much fun,” Robbie Krieger told Guitar World in 1994. “The warden was gone.”
Eschewing the high tech luxury of Sunset Sound, the Doors decided to record in their unassuming “workshop” at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard. “It was the room we had rehearsed in forever,” recalled John Densmore in the documentary Mr. Mojo Risin. “Our music was seeped into the walls. We were very comfortable. It was home.” Like a fraternity common room, the cramped space was littered with empty beer bottles, dog-eared magazines, an endless tangle of cables and assorted instruments – plus a jukebox and pinball machine. “It was tight,” says Botnick, who was ensconced in the upstairs office behind a portable mixing board. “It was like sardines.”
During takes, Morrison would grab his gold Electrovoice 676-G stage mic and sing in the adjoining bathroom, which served as a provisional vocal booth. The room’s tile provided impressive natural acoustics, and he ripped the door off its hinges to better commune with his bandmates. The building has changed hands several times since the Doors recorded there, but its most recent incarnation – a bar, appropriately – paid tribute to the sessions with a plaque in the bathroom stall.
The cartwheeling “L’America” predates the “L.A. Woman” sessions by more than a year. The track had been intended for inclusion in Antonioni’s 1970 psychedelic drama, Zabriskie Point. The Italian auteur had notably tapped the Yardbirds for 1966’s Blow-Up, and it appeared he might do the same this time around with the Doors. He visited the band in the recording studio, but their intensity not to mention volume proved too much for him to handle at close range. “We played it for him, and it was so loud, it pinned him up against the wall,” Manzarek told L.A. Weekly in 2011. “When it was over, he thanked us and fled.” Predictably, the song was not included in the film. The Doors were in good company – Jerry Garcia, John Fahey and Pink Floyd also had work rejected from the soundtrack.
The lyrics for “L.A. Woman‘s” lead single the Doors’ first to crack the Top 40 since “Touch Me” two years earlier – were born out of a particularly noisy fight between Robbie Krieger and his future wife, Lynne. “Every time we had an argument, she used to get pissed off and go out the door and slam the door so loud the house would shake,” he said in “Mr. Mojo Risin“. But the title borrows a signature phrase from Duke Ellington, who would end every concert with the sign-off, “We love you madly.” Krieger’s bandmates,
Aside from “L’America,” which was already in the can, the basic tracks for “L.A. Woman” came together in just six days spread between December 1970 and January 1971. Mixing took an additional week, but that’s still a blink of an eye compared to the nine months it took to complete the Doors’ cumbersome 1969 work, “The Soft Parade“. The rapid pace ensured that the mercurial Jim Morrison, whose short attention span often led him towards destructive tendencies, remained focused and on his best behaviour. During a single session, which the singer dubbed “blues day,” they enthusiastically tackled “Cars Hiss By My Window,” “Been Down So Long,” “Crawling King Snake” and several other loose jams.
When the band gathered at Poppi Studios early January 1971 to mix “L.A. Woman” with Bruce Botnick, they made some last minute embroideries to their epic album closer. Thunderstorm sound effects were added to “Riders on the Storm,” but Morrison had a more subtle contribution: two ghostly whispers of the song’s title on the fadeout. The eerie send-off is even more haunting in retrospect. “That’s the last thing he ever did,” Ray Manzarek told Uncut. “An ephemeral, whispered overdub.” The song was released as the album’s second single, entering the Billboard charts on July 3rd, 1971 – the day Jim Morrison died.
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