The Fat Angel Sings

Permit some warranted hyperbole: the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, an intensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction, like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist. Backed with his equally distinctive burbling guitar, “Say Laura” is a perfect gateway to his oeuvre with some of his loveliest compositions – and There They Were may be his best ever. 

“This constant shift between dream and reality, between the ground and a consciousness-expanding dimension, is what makes Eric Chenaux records so precious and unique. The ultimate and safe mind-altering experience. Not to be missed.” – The Quietus

“As delicate and lovely as a rare orchid, the album follows its own inner logic, with the songwriter guiding us through a wide-open landscape that’s unusual but strangely familiar all the same.” – Uncut

“Beguiling. An album brimming with a sublime alien balladry.” – Record Collector

“Chenaux is instantly recognisable as a phenom, finding endless new patterns for melodies to converge and separate and take the long road home.” – YellowGreenRed

“When he’s soloing, it sounds like his instrument is made of wax and he’s playing in a warm room, all the notes are bending and sliding and drooping. It’s got this slippery warmth to it.” ATTN Crucial Listening

“There are surface parallels between “Say Laura” and Arthur Russell’s minimal avant pop, but there are also more subtle similarities to Talk Talk’s floating ambience, the most stripped-down Sun Ra sessions, and the boundless curiosity and willingness to chase impulses that This Heat’s Gareth Williams explored with the sideways song writing of his obscure Flaming Tunes side project. In less careful hands, the combination of free range guitar exploration and crooning vocals could come off as awkward or disjointed, but Chenaux’s patient guidance makes even the most disruptive moments of “Say Laura” feel sweet” – All Music

“Compelling… songwriting that’s atypical and free from boundaries, driven by a commitment to unexpected sounds and uninhibited exploration.” – The Wire

The new record by Eric Chenaux is his most immaculate and pristine. “Say Laura” perfectly incarnates the counter-intuitive interplay of instrument and voice that Chenaux has been revealing and revelling in throughout the past decade: his gently unhinged juxtaposition of resplendently smooth, seductively assured singing and puckish, frazzled, thoroughly destabilized guitar could come from no other musician. The five wandering, wondering ballads on “Say Laura” bring Chenaux’s semi-improvised but keenly intentional song writing to its fullest, clearest, warmest and coolest articulation; uncompromising and generous, hyper-specific and loose, spartan and luxurious, elemental and ornate.

“Say Laura” might as well be a jazz record — certainly as much as his previously acclaimed albums Slowly Paradise and Skullsplitter tread that genre-adjacent territory — though it also features moments and melodies that come as close to pop flirtation as Chenaux is likely to get. But above all, “Say Laura” breathes like no other Chenaux album. Voice and guitar are inscribed with elemental clarity in a wondrously open, symbiotic sonic space. His pure tenor croon glides through a crisp, reverberant ether while his fried guitar careens dizzily and giddily, every gesture and timbre captured in unflinching detail by engineer Cyril Harrison.

Chenaux has also made his most minimal, controlled, regulated and rhythmic record. Citing a spectrum of influences — Sun Ra, Jeanne Lee, Gang Starr, Charlie Parker, Betty Carter, EPMD and Thelonious Monk — “Say Laura” expands on a foot-pedal technique Chenaux has previously used here and there, taking things to a more programmatic level: beats composed on a Boss drum machine are used as noise gate triggers, slowed down and inserted into his guitar signal path to create tempered pulses.

Opener “Hello, How? And Hey” immediately establishes these subtly heightened characteristics of elementalism, dualism and structure, with Chenaux’s vocal tracing gorgeous soaring melodies across a single beating chord, occupying all the space until guitar and Wurlitzer (courtesy of the album’s only guest, long-time collaborator Ryan Driver) enter in a cascade of twinkle and wah at the two-minute mark, eventually leaving the vocal behind as the song’s second half gives way to a woozy guitar and keyboard improv over the chordal pulse. Album closer “Hold The Line” follows a similar motif, the vocal playing more on folk and pop tropes, but wrapping up in time for a gloriously gnarled eight-minute instrumental ramble. “There They Were” is something closer to unprecedented in Chenaux’s twenty-year songbook: singing and soloing at the same time, he breathlessly repeats a joyous highlife-tinged vocal refrain without pause, cutting against his trademark languorous pace, propelling the song for miles. Title track and lead single “Say Laura” is the centre piece distillation of the album’s stylistic, compositional and spatial mission: sparse but lush, controlled but wild, every note in its place and all over the place.

Interviewed as The Wire magazine’s cover star in 2017, Chenaux said “the details of our lives are often produced with improvisation and experimentation and in my music, improvisation is a way to hear those details I would not likely be able to hear otherwise.” The details on “Say Laura” achieve new heights of lucid acuity. Eric Chenaux just keeps getting better, and “Say Laura” captures him at his best.

Not everything has to come to a logical conclusion; not everything needs to be about something. In her lecture “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” the writer Garielle Lutz explains her fondness for language where “the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language.” By that, she means that language, for some, is at its best when it can be isolated, when it takes on a sort of synesthetic, acoustic resonance. You can apply this terminology to the song writing of New Zealand’s Aldous Harding, who, for four albums, has made folk music with a conceptual weight that’s difficult to categorize or assign to any established narrative. Her latest album, “Warm Chris“, is a record of the portable solitude that Lutz writes about: It is opaque, surreal, and above all, lonely.

At first blush, Warm Chris is almost a discouraging listen. Its soft, slightly psychedelic folk pop is deceptively thorny and dense. You have to learn how to listen to it, kind of like how you have to teach yourself how to read Samuel Beckett or Renata Adler. It is less accessible than 2019’s Designer: Most of the pop hooks and acoustic bass drops are gone. It moves slowly, and the music flourishes where you least expect it. A song like “Ennui” builds in waves, with an arrangement that snakes from strident pianos to squeezes of baritone sax. Harding’s voice sounds plucked from a dream, growing more awake as the song progresses. “No one look/And a canny fucking fill/Don’t lie to me!” she sings in one moment. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not supposed to: Harding wants you to find your own logic. “I just want everyone to feel like a philosopher. You put on a record, and that record belongs to you,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview.

Harding is a painstaking songwriter, even though her lyrics tend to veer toward disorder. At times, the vantage point can feel almost dissociative. On “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” she subverts a traditional song title into something alien and mournful. Banjos and horns bloom brilliantly as Harding sings about love, and her words are soft and searching, as if she were narrating the view through a train window. On the title track, her voice drops from soprano to alto and she sings about watching paper planes burn. Her delivery almost recalls a lullaby, and the tape hiss in the background is as gentle and constant as the sound of waves heard from within a seaside home.

For all her inscrutable intensity, there are also moments of levity and light. “Lawn” is sneaky and surreal, the kind of song that demands you put on vintage Mary Quant and go boogie—or turn into a human-sized gecko wearing Twiggy eyeliner, which is what happens to Harding in the video. On “Leathery Whip,” her voice bends abruptly from the sound of a long-haired songwriter living in Laurel Canyon circa 1972 to that of the chipmunk outside her window. “Here comes life with his leathery whip/Here comes life with his leathery leathery!” she exclaims, joined by the flat, freaky baritone of Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson. She draws out her words as she sings, blowing up vowels like twisty balloons. It’s funny yet vaguely threatening, like the last thing you’d hear before Harry Houdini saws you in half.

The lilt of her New Zealand accent gives an odd, familiar poetry to the words “cheap wig” – it’s just the kind of crisp, slightly absurd imagery often found in her lyrics.

It was here that Harding finished writing the bulk of her fourth album “Warm Chris“, bunkering down with Jessie and her mother, Lorina, during the first of 2020’s lockdowns, before heading to Monmouth in Wales to record with John Parish, her long time producer with whom she shares an almost wordless rapport. (“Our gifts have a really lovely way of communicating without us,” she says of Parish, who also worked on albums “Party” and “Designer“.)

A week out from the album’s release, she’s back home again. Birdsong rings loudly in the long, full gaps between words as Harding thoughtfully coaxes out each sentence – some people talk just to fill out the silence, Harding is happy to sit in it.

If there’s a beguiling opacity to her public statements, it’s in step with her lyrics. On “Warm Chris” she ranges from breezily evocative similes (“The weather opened up like a birthday card,” she sings on second single “Fever”) to more obscure reflections (“Here comes life with his leathery whip”), but even more so than her earlier albums, it’s less about what the words mean than how they feel when Harding sings them.

“For this album I was a lot less focused on ‘poetry’, as I understand it,” she says. “I was more focused on phonics, pure phonics. Letting sounds stand alone as poetry against their background, just the sound of the word, rather than people knowing [the meaning].

“I use my voice like language or clothing,” she says, of the slippery character of her vocals. “I understand that that’s really interesting to people … I’m sort of like the Jim Carrey of the indie world or whatever.

“I use whatever sounds I need to fill the gaps in my musical universe. I make songs that I want to hear, how I get there really does feel handed to me.”

I wonder aloud if part of people’s fascination with her inscrutability – in her lyrics, her stage presence, her surreal video clips – stems from the authenticity listeners usually expect from singer-songwriters.

The sound of “Warm Chris” is sparse and oblique, and trying to anchor yourself in Harding’s lyrics can feel like organizing a narrative from the shape of passing clouds. But that’s also where its brilliance lies, what makes this some of Harding’s best song writing yet. “Warm Chris” asks you to surrender catchiness and legibility and think instead about how a lyric like “sometimes shepherds have it right” (from “Staring at the Henry Moore”) might also be infused with inexplicable melancholy. Or why on “Lawn,” you have to suppress a giggle when Harding rhymes “They don’t mean a thing to me” with “All these lamps are free!” She favours this kind of free association, unconnected turns of phrase that synthesize the strange, lonely resonance of staring at a piece of abstract art or visiting an empty beach in winter. These are concrete images, but “Warm Chris” isn’t explicit about anything: The feelings you have when you experience these songs are yours alone.

In 1973, artist manager David Geffen was basking in the success of his Asylum Records label, launched two years earlier with the backing of Atlantic Records. Emboldened by the commercial success of the Eagles, Asylum’s first band, and his earlier triumph managing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Geffen proposed another would-be supergroup by lobbying John David Souther, Chris Hillman and Richie Furay to join forces. With song writing experience and their own shared affinity for country-rock, the trio seemed poised to cash in on California’s ’70s rock gold rush.

If Souther Hillman Furay was pitched as a trio of equals, Geffen’s first consideration was Souther, already signed to an Asylum solo deal and writing songs with the Eagles, led by his former Longbranch Pennywhistle partner, Glenn Frey. “Souther Hillman Furay was David Geffen’s attempt to make them mainstream in the wake of the Eagles’ success,” Souther would later tell rock historian Barney Hoskyns. “I think he thought I’d be the Neil [Young] of the group.”

His new bandmates already enjoyed some of the luster Geffen sought for Souther. Chris Hillman had been a Byrd, a founding Burrito Brother and Stephen Stills’ wingman in Manassas. Richie Furay had followed Buffalo Springfield by co-founding Poco, one of the most influential L.A. country-rock units. Hillman recruited Manassas bandmates Paul Harris on keyboards and Al Perkins on pedal steel and lead guitar, along with Jim Gordon, former Derek and the Dominos drummer and a first-call studio player. Harris, Perkins and Gordon would be accorded co-billing behind the leaders in what was now called the Souther Hillman Furay Band.

With visions of CSN success dancing in Geffen’s head, Asylum enlisted producer Richard Podolor, who had guided Three Dog Night to an impressive streak of Top 40 single hits and gold albums. The Earlier bonds between Furay and Hillman, a valuable ally during Buffalo Springfield’s formation, and Manassas gave hope for a tight-knit, cohesive band, but Geffen either misread or ignored the chemistry between his three named stars. Hillman and Furay were accustomed to collaboration, but Souther was perceived as an arrogant, acerbic maverick.

Tension was most toxic between Souther and Furay, whose friendship with born-again guitarist Perkins catalyzed Furay’s evangelical fervour, prompting Souther and Hillman to forge their own “Heathen Defense League” only partly in jest. “Richie and I were just oil and water,” Souther would later note. “I’m not a great team player under those circumstances.

Chris Hillman would be more diplomatic. “Rather than collaborating, we each brought our own songs to the table, and everyone’s material had his own personal signature attached,” he recalls in his memoir, “Time Between: My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond“. That assessment would be borne out in the three principals’ musical temperaments. Souther’s worldly cool contrasted sharply with Furay’s earnest intensity, with middleman Hillman laid-back yet less mannered than Souther.

Country-rock was their common denominator, but The Souther Hillman Furay Band leads off with Richie Furay’s “Fallin’ in Love,” a spirited mainstream rocker propelled by Gordon’s muscular drumming, Harris’ surging organ fills and Perkins’ sharp electric lead guitar riffs. A typically jubilant Furay vocal shares the same energy and vaulting melodic shape as “A Good Feelin’ to Know,” his best-known Poco track, which powered “Fallin’ in Love” into the Top 40.

Country accents do shape Hillman’s first vocal feature, “Heavenly Fire,” an elegy to his Burrito comrade Gram Parsons, who had died in September ’73, remembered here as a fallen comrade “who lived the life you sang about.” Perkins’ mournful pedal steel, Harris’ keyboards, and Hillman’s mandolin honour the country-rock vision for which Parsons was already being canonized, but Hillman’s pensive vocal is nearly swamped by elaborate, lapidary backing harmonies on the final choruses.

J.D. Souther, meanwhile, proves the most prolific contributor, penning four of the album’s 10 tracks. “The Heartbreaker” is a loping, R&B-edged shuffle warning against a romantic predator with “a song and a suitcase, and a rodeo smile—just a picture of style” who seduces his prey with “that magic sound.” The song showcases the Detroit-born Texan’s laconic drawl and a laid-back, jaded sensibility shared with his pals in the Eagles, evoking life in the same fast lane they would map on Hotel California. Its third-person vantage point masks the irony in Souther’s own notoriety as a ladies’ man since his early days hanging at the Troubadour’s bar, with Linda Ronstadt, Judee Sill and Stevie Nicks among his conquests.

On “Border Town,” Souther glamorizes decadence in the first person to survey the perils in a Mexican border town, citing “the dope and the night life…no place you’d really want to hang around,” before admitting, “But…I think I might.” Latin percussion buoys the track as Souther offers a roguish commentary on “good-looking women, most of them easy” and “dudes” that are “pretty greasy.” What may have passed as a cinematic tableau in 1974 now sounds tone-deaf in its casual misogyny and ethnic stereotyping.

Throughout the album, Souther’s worldly cool offers a stark contrast to Furay’s earnest intensity, while Hillman emerges as middleman both musically and temperamentally. Sandwiched between Souther’s two rockers, Furay’s “Believe Me” is a forthright romantic ballad decorated with keening pedal steel and piano arpeggios before flexing more electric firepower courtesy of Perkins’ lead electric guitar. His third SHF contribution, “The Flight of the Dove,” is a minor-keyed, mid-tempo rocker that hints at a crisis of faith that may or may not be merely romantic in origin.

Hillman splits his remaining originals between “Safe at Home,” a strutting mid-tempo rocker enlivened by Perkins’ slashing guitar leads and Gordon’s splashing cymbal crashes, and the lysergic bluegrass of “Rise and Fall.” “Safe at Home” is another cautionary tale of wretched excess from alcohol to cocaine to faithless women, tailored for ’70s rock radio, while “Rise and Fall” points to Hillman’s future embrace of acoustic country and bluegrass.

For his remaining tracks, Souther pivots to his softer side and stronger suit as a writer. “Pretty Goodbyes” is a languid waltz with elegant lyrics and a lush choral arrangement. A better balladeer than a belter, Souther’s tender vocal and the track’s musical bloom cushion the blow in what’s essentially a kiss-off to his lover, admitting he’s been “lonelier with you than I was without.” On the album closer, “Dark, Deep and Dreamless,” Souther scales up to a grandiose ballad that adds an Eagles nest of contrapuntal backing vocals around an ascending melody that reaches for, but doesn’t quite achieve, Roy Orbison’s altitude, leaving a finale that stumbles toward bombast.

True to Geffen’s agenda, The Souther Hillman Furay Band, released in July 1974, accomplished its commercial mission and displayed the stylistic DNA of the Byrds, Poco and, yes, the Eagles, reaching #11 on the Billboard album chart and attaining gold status. Yet ultimately the SHF Band proved to be less than the sum of its parts, any cohesion frayed by internal friction. The antipathy between Souther and a now devout Furay only intensified, while Gordon’s increasingly volatile behaviour led to his departure, a precursor to mental illness that would lead to his psychotic break in 1983 and the murder of his own mother. They would complete a second album with new drummer Ron Grinel, the aptly titled Trouble in Paradise, which met with critical and commercial indifference.

Yes bassist Billy Sherwood revealed details of the fourth all-star Prog Collective album.

The supergroup has also released the lead track “House of the Rising Sun” featuring Gong’s Steve Hillage and David Clayton-Thomas of Blood Sweat & Tears.

Titled “Songs We Were Taught”, the follow-up to 2021’s “World on Hold” will arrive on July 1st and is available for preorder now. Among the performers this time are current Yes singer Jon Davison, former Jethro Tull guitarist Martin Barre, Steve Morse of Deep Purple, Rod Argent, Dweezil Zappa and Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal.

“Producer Billy Sherwood once again leads this uber-talented prog-rock supergroup, this time on a trip through some of the most recognizable and influential folk and art-rock songs of their generation,” label Purple Pyramid said in a statement. “Listen to how these stellar musicians transform the sound of ’60s and ’70s folk-rock into ethereal and atmospheric masterpieces!”

Listen to how these stellar musicians transform the sound of ’60s & ’70s folk rock into ethereal and atmospheric masterpieces!

Prog Collective, ‘Songs We Were Taught’ Track Listing
1. “The Sound of Silence” – Jon Davison (Yes), Geoff Downes (Yes/Asia)
2. “Year Of The Cat” – Billy Sherwood (Yes/Circa), David Sancious (E Street Band)
3. “House Of The Rising Sun” – David Clayton-Thomas (Blood Sweat & Tears), Steve Hillage (Gong)
4. “In The Land Of Grey And Pink” – Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal (Guns N’ Roses)
5. “Summer Breeze” – Roine Stolt (The Flower Kings), Steve Morse (Deep Purple)
6. “Fire And Rain” – Sonja Kristina (Curved Air), Martin Barre (Jethro Tull)
7. “The Weight” – Rod Argent (Zombies), Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (Doobie Brothers)
8. “Wild World” – Rosalie Cunningham (Ipso Facto), Patrick Moraz (Moody Blues)
9. “It’s Too Late” – Candice Night (Blackmore’s Night), Dweezil Zappa
10. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” – Martin Turner (Wishbone Ash), Jerry Goodman (Flock)

“Outdoor Crying” is a song about anguish and vulnerability – It’s about a search for meaning, identity and the struggle of committing to what it means to be human. With flavours of hip hop, rock, electronica, indie and folk all weaving together, the sonic palette of “Outdoor Crying” truly exemplifies its core message of remaining open and accepting the ever-changing nature of existence – “Always, at once, we are everything.” “I just wanted this song, and the whole album really, to sound like a person bare and naked, screaming into the void – letting every part of themselves explode into the ether” says Thomas. “A lot of the time, music is my way of inhabiting and making sense of, or exploring, my feelings; so with each song, what you’re really hearing is someone in the middle of going through something. I developed a sense of dissociation from my daily life a long time ago, as a mode of protection from a lot of hurt and fear I was dealing with. Although a lot of the source of that initial anguish is gone, the dissociation is something I’m still very much trying to unlearn, or let go of.

Over the years, my music has always been one of the only places where that connection to “feeling” has remained very strong, sometimes overwhelmingly so, and I think you can hear and feel that in the songs.” “Basically, if somebody asked me to describe my music, I would say: It’s the sound of someone trying”. “Outdoor Crying” is the third release from an upcoming collaboration album between two of Calder’s own alter egos, Daggy Man and Tom Calder.

The wait is over: Blondie’s career-spanning box set will finally be released this summer. Actually, make that box sets. “Against the Odds 1974-1982” has been in development for years; The Numero Group says in their product description that the catalogue number was assigned in 2016. Several Record Store Day releases tied to the project have been released, but few concrete details about the set – until now. The New York new wavers, who crossed into the pop charts on a wave of disco and post-punk with hits like “Heart of Glass,” “Call Me,” “Atomic,” “Rapture,” “The Tide is High” and others, will go deep with “Against the Odds“, billed as “the first ever authorized and in-depth archive in their history” – 126 tracks, 36 of them never before released, all remastered from the original tapes, with 180-gram vinyl lacquered at Abbey Road in London.

The biggest edition – a black or “Platinum Blonde” vinyl box, limited to 500 copies encompassing 10 LPs, a 10″ EP, a 7″ single and two books – will feature the six albums the band issued for Private Stock and Chrysalis between 1976 and 1982, plus a host of bonus material. The vinyl set boasts four LPs with as-yet unannounced track lists of B-sides, demos and rarities; their names are “Plaza Sound”, “Parallel Beats”, “Coca Cola” and “Home Tapes“. The 10”, “Out in the Streets“, features additional outtakes from the group’s pre-history, including a rehearsal tape from 1974 and demos cut with producer Alan Betrock a year later; on the 7″ single, there’s an unissued cover of The Doors’ “Moonlight Drive” backed with an “at-home sketch” called “Mr. Sightseer.” The first of two books feature a new set of liner notes by Erin Osmon, commentary and essays from members current (singer Debbie Harry, guitarist Chris Stein, drummer Clem Burke) and former (keyboardists Jimmy Destri, guitarists/bassists Frank Infante, Nigel Harrison, and Gary Valentine) as well as producers Mike Chapman and Richard Gottehrer, all across 144 pages; the second cover’s the band’s discography in visual form: picture sleeves, labels, and formats aplenty on 120 pages.

Now, from there, you’ve got a few choices of formats. An 8CD set includes the six original albums and two bonus discs (Home Tapes and Out in the Streets); note that despite the absence of two of the bonus discs from the deluxe set – and a product description from Amazon touting “the very best of the out-takes & rarities from the Super Deluxe Collectors’ Edition,” Numero notes that all 124 tracks appear here (along with a 128-page hardcover book). Now, if you just want the bonus tracks (52 in total), you’ve got that opportunity as well, thanks to a 4LP set with 128-page hardcover book (featuring the same four bonus LPs as the deluxe set) or a 3CD set with 164-page booklet.

they’re all due August 26th.

Dunedin, New Zealand band the Verlaines were in between their 1985 debut “Hallelujah All the Way Home” and sessions for what would become their sophomore album “Bird Dog” when they played Auckland in May of 1986. The gig was recorded in hopes of capturing a releasable live version of their tune “Slow Sad Love Song” for inclusion on “Bird Dog“, which didn’t end up happening as they’d hoped. The tapes of the full performance that surfaced more than 30 years later as “Live at the Windsor Castle, Auckland, May 1986” find the trio of Graeme Downes, Jane Dodd, and Robbie Yeats burning through material from that early phase of their run in strong, scrappy form. The entire presentation of the set crackles with an unpolished bootleg energy, down to the thin applause between songs from what sounds like a small but enthusiastic audience watching an obscure band rock a tiny club. Add in the less-than-high-fidelity recording quality and the Verlaines’ generally shambling approach to melancholy melodic pop, and Windsor Castle is the perfect document of where the band was at on that May night.

They tear through songs from their debut like the jumpy “For the Love of Ash Grey” and “Lying in State,” as well as tunes from the yet-to-be-tracked “Bird Dog“. Some of the band’s best songs from this era were their early singles, and live versions of “Doomsday,” “Pyromaniac,” and the slow-burning “You Cheat Yourself of Everything That Moves” are among the most exciting moments of this live set as well.

released June 6th, 2022

Label: Schoolkids Records

Light in the Attic Records, in cooperation with Laurie Anderson, proudly announces the inaugural title in their ongoing “Lou Reed Archive Series: Words & Music, May 1965“. Released in tandem with the late artist’s 80th birthday celebrations, the album offers an extraordinary, unvarnished, and plainly poignant insight into one of America’s true poet-songwriters. Capturing Reed in his formative years, this previously unreleased collection of songs—penned by a young Lou Reed, recorded to tape with the help of future bandmate John Cale, and mailed to himself as a “poor man’s copyright”—remained sealed in its original envelope and unopened for nearly 50 years. Its contents embody some of the most vital, ground breaking contributions to American popular music committed to tape in the 20th century.

Through examination of these songs rooted firmly in the folk tradition, we see clearly Lou’s lasting influence on the development of modern American music – from punk to art-rock and everything in between. A true time capsule, these recordings not only memorialize the nascent sparks of what would become the seeds of the incredibly influential Velvet Underground; they also cement Reed as a true observer with an innate talent for synthesizing and distilling the world around him into pure sonic poetry.

The story of how this reissue came to pass is just as delicious as the music. In his early days as a songwriter-for-hire, Lou Reed attempted to protect his intellectual property by engaging in what has been referred to as a “poor man’s copyright”: mailing a copy of a reel containing a bunch of demos to himself. That tape sat dormant for decades, discovered only as archivists Don Fleming and Jason Stern were digging through Reed’s personal effects following his death in 2013. What they discovered were the sketches for future classics like “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Men of Good Fortune,” rendered roughly with just guitar and vocals. The remastered versions of these tunes, released by Light In The Attic as part of an apparent series of archival releases, feels like getting 4K footage of the Big Bang. It’s the raw material of a whole universe of art being flung into the black to eventually evolve into supernovas.

Featuring contributions from Reed’s future bandmate, John Cale, “Words & Music, May 1965” presents in their entirety the earliest-known recordings of such historic songs as “Heroin,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and “Pale Blue Eyes”—all of which Reed would eventually record and make indelibly influential with the Velvet Underground. Also included are several more previously-unreleased compositions that offer additional insight into Reed’s creative process and early influences.

Produced by Laurie Anderson, Don Fleming, Jason Stern, Hal Willner, and Matt Sullivan, the album features newly-remastered audio from the original tapes by GRAMMY®-nominated engineer, John Baldwin. Rounding out the package are new liner notes from acclaimed journalist and author, Greil Marcus, plus in-depth archival notes from Don Fleming and Jason Stern, who oversee the Lou Reed Archive.

“I was working for a record company as a songwriter,” Lou Reed remembered in 1972, “where they’d lock me in a room and they’d say, ‘Write ten surfing songs,’ ya know, and I wrote ‘Heroin’ and I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got something for ya.’  They said, ‘Never gonna happen, never gonna happen.'”  Reed wasn’t able to introduce “Heroin” to the world until March 1967 when the Verve label released “The Velvet Underground & Nico.  The VU’s debut album disappointed commercially but became greatly influential; Brian Eno once quipped that while the LP only sold around 30,000 copies in its first five years, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”  (It’s been cited that it actually sold over 58,000 copies in two years.)  The influence of Lou Reed, who died in 2013 at the age of 71, as a songwriter and an artist, has remained mighty over the ensuing decades. 
The centerpiece of the inaugural Lou Reed Archive Series release is the Deluxe 45-RPM Double LP Edition of Words & Music, May 1965. Limited to 7,500 copies worldwide, this stunning collection was designed by multi-GRAMMY®-winning artist Masaki Koike and features a stylized, die-cut gatefold jacket manufactured by Stoughton Printing Co., with sequential foil numbering. Housed inside are two 45-RPM 12-inch LPs, pressed on HQ-audiophile-quality 180-gram vinyl at Record Technology Inc. (RTI) featuring the only vinyl release of “I’m Waiting for the Man” – May 1965 Alternate Version.” A bonus 7-inch, housed in its own unique die-cut picture sleeve and manufactured at Third Man Record Pressing includes the only vinyl release of six previously-unreleased bonus tracks providing a never-before-seen glimpse into Reed’s formative years, including early demos, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and a doo-wop serenade recorded in 1958 when the legendary singer-songwriter was just sixteen years old. An accompanying saddle-stitched, die-cut 28-page book features lyrics, archival photos, and liner notes Also included is an archival reproduction of a rarely-seen letter, written by Reed to his college professor and poet, Delmore Schwartz, circa 1964. The set includes a CD containing the complete audio from the package, housed in a die-cut jacket. 

releases August 26th, 2022