The Fat Angel Sings

The Rolling Stones 1981 album “Tattoo You” will be reissued in October across six physical formats including a five-disc super deluxe edition. The original album was put together mostly from studio outtakes from the 1970s and features well known singles such as “Waiting On A Friend” and the transatlantic top ten hit “Start Me Up“.

The album has been remastered (by Stephen Marcussen) and selected formats offer Lost & Found: Rarities a nine-track collection of previously unreleased songs from the period of the album’s original release, newly completed with additional vocals and guitar by the band. One of these tracks is called ‘Living In The Heart Of Love’ is a quintessential Stones rock workout with all of the group on top form, complete with urgent guitar licks and fine piano detail. Other highlights of Lost & Found include a killer version of “Shame, Shame, Shame,” first recorded in 1963 by one of the band’s blues heroes, Jimmy Reed; their reading of Dobie Gray’s soul gem “Drift Away”; and a fascinating reggae-tinged version of “Start Me Up.” This bonus disc of rarites comes with the two-CD deluxe, and the 4CD+vinyl LP super deluxe edition. The latter also includes two additional CDs of live performance with “Still Life – Wembley Stadium 1982“, a memento of the band’s London show in June that year from the Tattoo You tour.

The box set features a special lenticular sleeve and comes with a 124-page book featuring over 200 rare photos from the recording sessions and world tour and includes interviews with producer Chris Kimsey & photographer Hubert Kretzscmar. The Rolling Stones are easy to take for granted, but lately they’ve been giving us reminders of just how long they’ve been around. For instance, when drummer Charlie Watts announced he’d be not performingon the bands upcoming tour to recover from a medical procedure, many noted that he hadn’t missed a show since joining the Stones in 1963 — 58 years ago! Now they’re releasing a 40th anniversary reissue of 1981’s “Tattoo You“, widely considered to be their last great album.

Still Life: Wembley Stadium 1982 is an unmissable memento of the band’s London show in June of that year on the “Tattoo You” tour. The mighty 26-track set is packed with Stones mega-hits, including an opening “Under My Thumb” and all-time greats such as “Let’s Spend The Night Together,” “Honky Tonk Women” and “Brown Sugar.” The Wembley show has covers of the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination,” Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock,” the Miracles’ “Going To A Go-Go,” and early rock ‘n’ roller the Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace.” It also features early live workouts for tracks from the then-new Tattoo You such as “Start Me Up,” “Neighbours,” “Little T&A,” and “Hang Fire.”

There are no less than three vinyl versions of the Tattoo You reissue: A single LP vinyl remaster, a 2LP vinyl deluxe with the nine bonus tracks and a 5LP vinyl box set which includes the album, bonus tracks and the Wembley gig. Note: the vinyl box also includes the 124-page book and lenticular artwork, just like the CD super deluxe!

“Tattoo You” will be reissued on 22nd October 2021. “TATTOO YOU” — 40TH Anniversary Edition, A whole new experience… 9 new unheard tracks (including ‘Living In The Heart Of Love’ which you can hear now) alongside an all-new 2021 remaster of the classic album & Stones infamous Wembley Stadium ‘82 live show.

Despite its unorthodox construction methods, Tattoo You arrived as a surprisingly cohesive album in August 1981, reaching the top of the charts – just like the previous six Rolling Stones albums, spawning some of the band’s most popular songs. We take a look at these tunes and others in our track-by-track guide to Tattoo You below.

1. “Start Me Up”

“Start Me Up,” Tattoo You’s opening tracks and one of the Stones’ most all-time popular songs, was originally recorded as a reggae-style number called “Never Stop” during the “Some Girls” sessions. Then the band dipped into an earlier version. “That take on Tattoo You was the only take that was a complete rock ‘n’ roll take,” Jagger said in 1995. “And then it went to reggae completely for about 20 takes. And that’s why everyone said, ‘Oh, that’s crap. We don’t want to use that.’ And no one went back to take two, which was the one we used – the rock track.”

2. “Hang on Fire”

Jagger and Richards, not exactly known for their subtlety, get straight to the point on “Hang Fire” — “In the sweet old country where I come from, nobody ever works, yeah, nothing gets done” — taking direct aim at England. “It serves them right for kickin’ us out,” Richards said of the song in 1983, referring to the time the band left the country in 1971 as a result of a massive tax bill owed to the government. “It’s [England] coming to terms with a whole lot of problems that have been brewing for years, and the only thing it needed for these problems to come to a head was for the money to get tight.” Like “Start Me Up,” “Hang Fire” began life during the Some Girls sessions.

3. “Slave”

“Slave” may lack any real lyrical narrative, but it makes up for that with a great lineup of guests. The Who’s Pete Townshend sings backing vocals, while saxophonist Sonny Rollins (who plays on two other album tracks) takes a solo on a song leftover from 1976’s “Black And Blue”. The jazz great later revealed that his wife had had to convince him to accept the gig. “I didn’t relate to them, because I thought they were just derivative of black blues,” he told the New York Times. “I do remember once I was in the supermarket up in Hudson, N.Y., and they were playing Top 40 records. I heard this song and thought, ‘Who’s that guy?’ His playing struck a chord in me. Then I said, “Wait a minute, that’s me!” It was my playing on one of those Rolling Stones records.”

4. “Little T&A”

Kick-started with a classic Richards riff, “Little T&A” – an “Emotional Rescue” cast-off – highlights the guitarist’s innate ability to write a straightforward rock ‘n’ roll song, complete with slap-back delay and gritty lead vocals. “That song’s just about every good time I’ve had with somebody I’d met for a night or two, and never seen again,” Richards said in 1983. “And also about the shit that sometimes goes down when you just sort of bump into people unknowingly and not knowing the scene you’re walking in on, you know? You pick up a chick and end up spending the night in the tank, you know?”

5. “Black Limousine” 

“Black Limousine” offers a slightly different, and more sentimental, attitude toward women than the preceding “Little T&A.” The song – also stemming from the Emotional Rescue sessions – is one of the few that guitarist Ron Wood is credited on as a writer. He built the central riff around an old Texas blues style. “‘Black Limousine’ came about from a slide guitar riff that was inspired in part by some Hop Wilson licks from a record that I once owned,” Wood said in the 2003 book “According To The Stones”. “I thought, ‘That’s really good, I’m going to apply that.'”

6. “Neighbours”

Don’t expect to get a good night’s sleep when living next door to a rock guitarist. In 1981, Richards and his wife Patti Hansen were evicted from their New York City apartment following noise complaints filed by fellow building-dwellers. Seemingly inspired by his bandmate’s housing woes, Jagger penned lyrics to “Neighbours,” whose music was workshopped for Emotional Rescue. The accompanying music video shows the band getting the last laugh, jamming in an apartment and singing out the window for all to hear.

7. “Worried About You”

The Stones reached back several albums to Black and Blue to piece together “Worried About You,” a ballad that features a guitar solo by Wayne Perkins, who had once auditioned as a potential replacement for Mick Taylor, and Billy Preston on keyboards. “It was a bit of discovery period for me as well as being discovered,” Perkins recalled. “I was thinking more like a session player, but it was becoming clear to me that these guys were serious and wanted me as their new guitar player. It was a great situation to be thrust into.”

8. “Tops”

Even though he had left the band seven years earlier, Mick Taylor shows up on Tattoo You thanks to “Tops,” a Goats Head Soup–era song that includes his fiery guitar solo. Pianist Nicky Hopkins also appears on the track, as does the band’s old producer Jimmy Miller, who plays percussion. Taylor’s distinct playing style stands out. In Richards’ biography, “Life”, he notes that Taylor has a “melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song.”

9. “Heaven”

“Heaven” came together in the studio during a midnight session without Richards or Wood present. Jagger, producer Chris Kimsey, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts recorded the track without the two guitarists. “Mick started playing the chord sequence, and I sat down at the piano and started following along, and next thing I knew, it sounded really good,” Kimsey recalled. “So I told the assistant to roll it, and we put some things on it and it sounded very good.” “Heaven” was originally shaped during 1980’s Emotional Rescue.

10. “No Use in Crying”

“No Use in Crying” is the second of two “Tattoo You” tracks that boasts a Ron Wood song writing credit (and like many of the 1981 LP’s songs, it comes from the recent Emotional Rescue era). As the newest member of the band, he quickly realized that if he wanted a place on a Rolling Stones record, he needed to speak up. “One of the lessons I had to learn was that if you want to get a credit,” he remembered, “it has to happen there and then in the studio, as you’re recording it.”

11. “Waiting on a Friend”

A charming end to a rock-filled record, “Waiting on a Friend” is a love letter from Jagger to his bandmates, originally recorded during the Goats Head Soup sessions in Jamaica. “We all liked it at the time, but it didn’t have any lyrics,” the singer notes in the liner notes to 1993’s Jump Back collection. New overdubs include pianist Nicky Hopkins and sax player Sonny Rollins, along with Santana member Michael Carabello on percussion. “The lyric I added is very gentle and loving, about friendships in the band.”

Adrianne Lenker’s enthusiasm remains undimmed. Lenker is the singer, guitarist, and songwriter for Big Thief, the most vital band of 2019. Back in May of that year, Big Thief released one of the best albums of the year with U.F.O.F. Rather than ride the wave of acclaim, they’re making a deeply uncustomary move for almost any band, let alone one who just experienced such a breakthrough: If art proves that power is vulnerability, then Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker is one of the most powerful voices in music today. This much was clear from the release of breakthrough albums “Masterpiece” and “Capacity” and has since been reaffirmed furthermore by widely acclaimed albums “U.F.O.F.” and “Two Hands” as well as Lenker’s solo work. Big Thief’s music is its own introduction: deeply intimate, unpretentiously queer, seamlessly blending the autobiographical with the narrative to create a sound that is both frank and steeped in dreamy nostalgia. In October that year they released their second great album of the year, “Two Hands”. These two albums are very different, but taken together they demonstrate the range and emotional honesty that have quickly made Big Thief one of the most compelling bands working today. In addition to her musical talent, Lenker is also a skilled visual artist. She mentions that she’s never had lessons, and doesn’t practice as much as she’d like, but she’s thrilled that she gets to do so. She says it’s all about showing up for yourself.  Big Thief’s “experiments with sound” began in 2014, when Lenker was just 21. After graduating from the prestigious Berklee School of Music, she moved to New York and met Buck Meek in a neighbourhood convenience store. Bonded by a shared love of classic folk-rock artists like The Band, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Fleetwood Mac, the pair started playing music together, and eventually saved enough money to buy a van to tour in. Lenker and Meek travelled the East Coast as a duo, and recorded an album under the name Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek, before officially forming Big Thief with Oleartchik and former drummer Jason Berger in 2015. Together, the quartet scraped up enough money and gear to make a record in a friend’s house in upstate New York, which became Big Thief’s arresting 2016 debut, “Masterpiece”. Not long after, Big Thief’s music caught the ear of Luke Temple (Here We Go Magic), who brought them on tour, and connected them to Saddle Creek Records, as well as their first booking agent. Their stunning breakthrough record, 2017’s “Capacity”, followed shortly after.  Big Thief’s music can very often achieve a beauty that feels as though it has always existed, speckled with the wisdom and humanity of Nick Drake and Joni Mitchell. In many ways, they seem like a band that could have existed and accrued a fervent fanbase in nearly any era from the ’60s onward, sharing bills with Pete Seeger, R.E.M., or Vashti Bunyan. But fashion-wise, Lenker seems to be taking her cues from the early ’90s goth scene today. Lenker has the sort of backstory that seems ready-made for a biopic. Among her fans, it’s already become somewhat legendary. She was born into what she has called a religious cult in Indianapolis, which her parents left when she was four. For a while, Lenker, her parents, and her two siblings were homeless, either living in a van or with various family acquaintances. Her father was a musician, and she started playing his guitar at the age of six. “And then I came to him with a song written. It was an angry song. I was angry. But the one that I remember even more clearly, was the one that I wrote when I was 10,” she continues. “That’s when I really started getting in a flow of writing, and that one was called ‘So Little Life.’ It was basically what I still write about.” She starts to faintly sing, her voice as fragile as some of the most exposed moments on her albums. “‘So little life to live, so many words to say/ When I stop and try to say them, everything fades away/ When I drift out of this dream world, it’s usually just in time to realize everything will be fine.”

Lenker is, as you have probably surmised by now, an extremely polite person. As such, I get the sense that she is too nice to not at least make an attempt to answer a question even if I can tell she’s not exactly thrilled to be talking about the more headline-ready aspects of her backstory, as she perhaps senses that it could overshadow her already voluminous musical achievements.  “Well, I mean, it was strange. That religious group was interesting. But also there was conflict beyond that,” she says. “We all need ways of processing things. I think I was called to music because it was this thing that was always there for me that I could pour my heart into safely.”

She says there’s “not any one religion or faith that I’ve subscribed to, but I value all perspectives, because I think that there’s so much to be gleaned from many different religions and spiritualities. I don’t like it when religions take it to the point where they discredit all other religions, because how could one sector of people have figured it out and know that that’s it? But I do think that there’s so much beauty in a lot of the stories or scriptures. And there’s so much more studying that I want to do.”

When asked if her upbringing turned her off to stricter religious observance, she replies, “I never went through a wave of hating Christianity, even though my parents were born-again Christians, and there were a lot of ideas that were being practiced that I think were misguided. ‘You’re going to hell if you do this or this or this. This is evil. This is sinful, to watch these films or to let the Bible touch the floor or to pray without a head covering or to name your children non-biblical names.’ 

Her dad started taking her to open mic nights when she was 12, and it was indeed as awkward as you might imagine. “People were always like, ‘Whoa, she’s only this age and she’s doing this?’ I was always the youngest person in any group. I had a band and I didn’t go to high school, all my friends were older than me,” she remembers. “It was pretty cool to have such a focus at that age, but also it alienated me from a lot of people my age. So I felt pretty lonely and I didn’t really have many friends when I was a kid.”     She stresses that this was her decision: “It wasn’t imposed on me at all. I wanted it.” Her dad was managing her, and raised money from investors to record a few albums. “Naturally, as I was only 13 or 14, I wasn’t really old enough to have all the tools and mechanisms to realize my own vision, so I was just part of the vision of the producer and my father and the people around me,” she says. “It was basically my schooling because I was always in the studio, but when we finished the project, I was kind of like, ‘Holy hell.’”“Think of how much you grow between 12 and 14 years old,” she continues. “I got into Elliott Smith and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen and I was like, ‘This doesn’t resonate with me. I want to make music on my terms and in a different way and I don’t even know what that is yet, but I think I want to go to school.’” She decided she wasn’t ready for a music career just yet, and instead wanted to learn more about “my craft.” (You can find her teenage album from 2006 if you look hard enough, though she doesn’t consider it part of her official discography.)It was difficult for her to break the news that she wasn’t ready. “I had to separate from my dad because that’s naturally what happens anyway when you’re a teenager, you push away from your parents,” she says. “But I had this added layer of a music career that was tied to him.” After earning her GED, she went to the Berklee College Of Music on a scholarship provided by Susan Tedeschi, singer and guitarist for the Tedeschi Trucks Band. When I ask her if she ever wonders what her life would be like if she had gone ahead and pursued her music career at the age of 14 and perhaps had achieved an ’00s style guitar-pop teen idol career analogous to Michelle Branch or Avril Lavigne, she shoots the idea down as forcefully as I’ve her heard talk in the time I’ve spent with her.“ I just don’t think it would have been possible for me. I’m too stubborn,” she says. “I think I would have been like, ‘This goes against my spirit. No thanks.’ I just don’t think I would have been able to melt into it at all.”***At Berklee, Lenker finally got to have a normal, if quite bohemian, young adult life: learning music, making friends, dumpster diving, skateboarding, and forming a band that had two drummers but no name. (They never settled on one.) During one show, she played with a band fronted by Buck Meek, who had already graduated from Berklee by that point. Meek grew up immersed in music in the small town of Wimberley, Texas. His mother gave him his first guitar lesson when he was “five or six. “My little hometown was this refuge for a lot of the old outlaw songwriters and Austin musicians from the ’60s and ’70s who moved out whenever the tech bloom blew up there,” he recalls. “So Ray Wylie Hubbard and Butch Hancock from the Flatlanders and some of the guys from Bob Wills’ band were out there. And they all took me under their wing, one way or the other. He began playing rhythm guitar for old-school types such as Slim Richey, “who played with Herb Ellis back in the day,” and Django Porter, who’d played guitar with Merle Haggard. He would perform with their bands at roadhouses, barbecues, private parties, funerals, weddings. “But not for money necessarily,” he says. “Just for the love of it.” Though the musicians were all in their 50s and 60s, Meek doesn’t recall anyone thinking it was strange that they had a 13-year-old guitar player in their band.  In Texas, I think it’s part of the culture,” he explains. “It’s passed down through the generations like that. The summer after he graduated from Berklee, his ragtime band Mobtet played with Lenker’s unnamed group, which “was just blowing my mind,” he remembers. “And she was so incredible. Everyone was dancing.”  

Lenker had already released a solo album, the first one she really counts, called “Hours Were The Birds”. She was considering moving back to Minnesota, where her family had settled, after graduation, but decided to give New York a chance as she’d had a nice time playing Manhattan’s Rockwood Music Hall one afternoon with her band. Meek and Lenker met the first day she moved to New York. “She had just stopped into Mr. Kiwi’s to get a juice on her way to the first apartment,” he remembers. They ran into each other at the grocery store and he offered to show her around the city.

“She’s opened up, I think, more with all this traveling. But at that point, she was pretty reserved. And she had this gaze that would just like cut through you like a snow wolf,” Meek says. “You would be speaking to her and she’d be looking at you so intensely. She’d be listening very deeply but not humouring you with any kind of response.”

They quickly fell into a musical rhythm, “playing old John Prine songs and writing songs together.” “All she wanted to do was play music,” he says. “I think pretty quickly it was clear that we had chemistry, and I think it was mostly rhythmic. Her guitar parts are really intricate, but there’s a lot of asymmetry in the fingerpicking. They’re super rhythmic but they are kind of crooked. The time’s changing a lot but there’s this pulse, and I had been playing rhythm guitar my whole life, so I think I was able to tap into that with her.” They started playing house shows and eventually started touring as a duo, cutting the collaborative A-sides and B-sides EPs together during off-hours at the studio that Andrew Sarlo, Lenker’s friend from Berklee, worked at. And then at some point, Lenker saved up enough to buy an electric guitar. They released two EPs of music they wrote on the road under their original moniker Buck and Anne, which was later released by Saddle Creek Records as one unified album “A-sides and B-sides” featuring a photo of the couple next to their white conversion van which they’d named Bonnie. These songs can be more comfortably categorised as folk in comparison to Big Thief’s output, but they maintain that particular Lenker brilliance: a tender understanding and melancholy that is indicative of someone wise beyond their years. ‘Let me know reasons why we change,’ she sings on Kerina‘Why our bodies are more than just breath and veins.’

“She started writing these heavier, more rock ‘n’ roll songs. And so we figured we needed to build a band around that,” Meek says. They found drummer Jason Burger, and Meek then ran into bassist Max Oleartchik, who he had met years ago when they were roommates at a Berklee Music summer program for teenagers. He didn’t even know his old friend had come back from his native Israel, until they ran into each other on the street in Bushwick. “We needed a bass player and he just walked up to us, basically,” Meek says. “Manifested for the band.”Meek and Lenker named the group Big Thief after an idea they learned in a song writing workshop in Texas about “a trickster or thief that borrows from the collective conscious, and regenerates ideas and integrates them into his or her identity.” The newly formed quartet recorded Masterpiece with Sarlo and engineer James Krivchenia, who took over for Burger when he left the band.

“It marked the beginning of our creation, our creative process together as a band,” Lenker says. Regarding the title: “It was a joke in a way, because if this album is just all of us putting our hearts in and it’s the best we can make, it already is a masterpiece being what it is.  They recorded the follow-up, “Capacity” six months later, shortly after signing with Saddle Creek. The next time they hit the recording studio, they would only take five days between albums. 

“Capacity” feels like Big Thief’s most autobiographical record to date, although it remains unclear which stories are Lenker’s own and which are picked up from a life on the road. The themes return with weighted preoccupation to motherhood and family. On Mythological Beauty she confesses ‘I have an older brother I don’t know/he could be anywhere.’ This album is particularly striking for its uncensored honesty. Lenker shares details of fraught relationships as an adult next to her memories of being hit on the head by a railroad spike as a child in a freak accident; her mother sitting in the back seat ‘praying, “Don’t let my baby die.” Lenker invites the listener into her most intimate memories, but the abrupt creak and thud of recorded footsteps on a staircase in Pretty Things gently reminds us that we are in fact strangers on the outside, looking in.

Though it took a little while for some critics and fans to catch on, “Masterpiece” and “Capacity” released in 2016 and 2017, respectively — showed a band that already had themselves figured out.  They alternated between scrappy and hooky indie-rock punchers such as “Real Love” and “Animals,” and ballads such as “Mythological Beauty” and “Great White Shark” that set Lenker’s empathic voice against chords that grew around each other with gentle force.

Everyone quit their job (Lenker was a server in a ramen restaurant, Meek did everything from carpentry to delivering CSA vegetables via bicycle) to tour incessantly. In February of last year, Big Thief decamped to a cabin in Topanga Canyon, where Meek now lives, and set up an eight-track to demo songs.  It has been two years, and in that time Adrianne had just written so many songs. She writes a lot. So there were 50 songs that we felt could go on the record,” Meek says. (In case it wasn’t already clear just how prolific Lenker is, this was after already releasing a solo album, “Abysskiss” late last year. By the time “Two Hands” arrives, she will have released three albums within 12 months.  For a month we went through every song and built arrangements and hashed them out. It quickly became apparent to the band that they had two albums’ worth of material. But Lenker says, “We didn’t want to make a double album, because we felt it was too dense, especially for these particular songs. We just wanted each to have its own focus, and so pretty early on, we knew that we were going to make two records, and we knew that we wanted them to be very contrasting.  Big Thief, Sarlo, and engineer Dom Monks went to Bear Creek Studios in rural western Washington last summer to record “U.F.O.F.”, an entrancing collection of cosmic folk songs that was immediately deemed a classic and one of the year’s best when it was released in May. A few days after they finished work on that album, everyone went down to the Southwestern studio Sonic Ranch in the small town of Tornillo, Texas, about 30 miles away from El Paso, to record Two Hands, the more visceral and earthbound of the pair. If “U.F.O.F.” is the spirit, then “Two Hands” is the body. 

“I feel like they’re siblings. They come from the same place, and all the songs were written in the same time span, and they were forming in the womb of all of our spirits. So there’s some connective DNA, but they’re very different beings,” Lenker says in the park, remembering the two albums’ origins.

“U.F.O.F.” is meant to be more focused on the immeasurable, sort of suspended ethereal playing with textures and colours and layering in the production, staring out into the abyss,” she says. “And “Two Hands” is more the micro, zooming into the blood and tissue and guts of being a human, the raw, bare, naked bones, not much layering, capturing just our performances in the room, just very dry, no reverbs, just skin and flesh and human, finite, physical. But I think each of them contains parts of the others.”

“U.F.O.F”  was Big Thief’s third album in as many years, in which ‘F’ stands for ‘Friend.’ “Making friends with the unknown.. all my songs are about this,” Lenker has said of the album “If the nature of life is change and impermanence, I’d rather be uncomfortably awake in that truth than lost in denial.” At this point Big Thief had already been living and writing alongside each other for some time; Buck and Lenker had divorced and evolved their relationship into what they now understand as a “deep friendship”; and so when the band arrived at the studio, they not only knew each other but also these songs on a level which allowed them to be their most experimental and spontaneous yet.

The parallelism extends beyond the sound of the two albums and into their subject matter. U.F.O.F. is about being comfortable with the unknown, leaning into the mystery of life, of accepting that life is a moment that will pass, and you can embrace that or not. “You let go of everything you have, of everyone you love and even of your own body throughout the course of this life,” she says. “You could be completely numb to it all, but then you wouldn’t feel the incredible beauty of experiencing all of that as well.”

If U.F.O.F. concerns matters of impermanence and the greater mysteries of the world, then Two Hands is very much about the practical realities of life on Earth. Here, Big Thief show their skill at writing searing, perceptive songs about the ills that never seem to go away. “The Toy” addresses gun violence; “Shoulders,” police brutality; and “Forgotten Eyes,” homelessness and “the unheard voices that exist.” There are also plentiful outcries in the album, such as on “Shoulders” and “The Toy,” concerning humanity’s ongoing destruction of the planet.

“I keep trying to break through the numbness that washes over everything, that keeps people from being awake, where you can feel that rush of clarity that you’re part of the earth and that you feel something that’s connected between all of us,” she says. “I’ve just been trying to find a way to write about things from a place that I know resonates within my core rather than just stuff I agree with. How can we reach people? We’re taking more than we need and depleting and wounding the earth, and we can all feel it.”

Big Thief are a band guided by instinct and feeling. They never like to overthink anything. “I don’t think we should ever play anything more than we should ever have to,” Lenker says. “Once you play a song seven times, you’re going downhill  for us, anyway. It’s usually within those first few times of playing it that it’s the best, even if it’s full of imperfections.” When the band thought they were rehearsing the single “Cattails,” a jaunty ode to making peace with feeling infinitesimal that Lenker had finished that morning, Monks secretly began recording them, and that’s what you hear on U.F.O.F. “We walked into the control room and it was captured, that was it,” she says. “We didn’t have to work at it at all.”

In contrast to the wash of spectral bath of its sister album, Two Hands has some of the loudest and most caustic songs that Big Thief have done yet, including the protest anthem “Not.” “We were in Texas and it was like 120 degrees,” Meek says, “And so we just went for it.”

Big Thief released “Two Hands” just five months after “U.F.O.F” and christened it the “earth twin” to its “celestial” sister. All but two songs feature purely live vocal takes which relish the peatey quality of Lenker’s natural voice. Recorded in the dry heat of the desert, “Two Hands” combines the unfiltered intimacy of “Capacity” with the franker musicality of “U.F.O.F” to create some of their most impactful work yet. These are the songs Lenker stated she is the most proud of, “I can imagine myself singing them when I’m old… Musically and lyrically, you can’t break it down much further than this. It’s already bare-bones.”

They all decided to focus on live takes, with few overdubs for the album, giving them even less room to think too much. “There’s got to be some inherent magic that just makes you feel everything, and then you go from that, never building on something in order to fix it or to mask it,” says Lenker. “We would play a song, and we’d hear it back in the studio. That had to be it. We’re not going to add much.”

Ahead of U.F.O.F., Big Thief left Saddle Creek and signed with 4AD, the sort of independent label for whom the term “venerable” is too small; Meek is especially happy to be on the same label as the Breeders and Cocteau Twins. The band knew it was the right fit when Ed Horrox, head of A&R, heard their early demos and started air-drumming along.

Big Thief are, at best, indifferent to the business side of the music industry, and much of their music feels out of time, divorced from any particular current style or movement. (I was surprised to discover the band members all have personal Instagram accounts.) “I don’t really study the trends so much, but I tune into things that make me feel something — and that’s all over the place,” Lenker says. She proudly claims: “We’re song-based, definitely, and record-based, and not just singles on Spotify. We always think of things in terms of how it would translate on vinyl.” The band’s managers and team were largely supportive of the idea to put out two albums in a year, even understanding that the second album might not receive as much attention compared to U.F.O.F. Though Meek says there were some devil’s advocate arguments about whether the band might confuse listeners or flood the market, Big Thief ultimately felt it was best to do what felt best.Big Thief do not bring a lighting person on tour, none of the members wear the in-ear monitors that most musicians use to hear themselves while they play, and Krivchenia does not play on a drum riser, which Meek says tends to annoy the hell out of the stagehands at music festivals. All four of them play together all in a straight line in the centre of the stage, practically on top of each other, the intention being that all of the members can maintain eye contact with each other throughout the entire show. 

In 2020, after Big Thief’s March tour was abruptly cut short by the pandemic, Lenker claimed respite in a cabin in the mountains of western Massachusetts. Alone during a year marked by loss both global and personal, Adrienne sat with her thoughts and mourned. In the album’s sleevenotes she writes of this time as one of pain and hurting: “I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil Weinrobe (her chief collaborator on the album) arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time.” Despite this, or because of it, the time she spent in that homemade cabin studio brought forth her most beautiful solo albums to date.

“songs and instrumentals” began as an attempt to capture the particular beauty of the sound of her guitar in that space. The process was arduous, involving three winks of tinkering with a mass of tape machines, a binaural head and a pile of XLR cables. Nine of the songs on the album were written freshly during the recording session. Lenker and sound engineer Phil would start and end each day with an improvised acoustic guitar instrumental which they later collaged into the pieces which make up the first side of the instrumentals album. The second half is mostly windchimes. The albums are uniquely intimate, offering a breath taking insight into Lenker’s mind and relationship with nature. The artwork was painted by Lenker’s grandmother.

Everyone in Big Thief lives all over the place. Lenker, 28, is technically homeless, though she calls herself “homeful” as she is at home as long as she is near people she cares about. She’s about to sublet a place near her family in Minnesota. Meek, 32, lives in Topanga. Krivchenia, 30, lives in Los Angeles. And Oleartchik, 32, moved back to Israel  “between the mountains in Tel Aviv,” Meek says. “It’s this new chapter of taking care of ourselves first instead of sacrificing everything for the music,” he says of the arrangement. The band has check-ins by phone every Monday, which usually include saying no to a lot of business opportunities they find distasteful.

Lenker doesn’t sound too concerned with how to keep her art from getting turned into a commodity. She has much bigger plans that would preclude such an outcome. “I don’t think we just want to be a touring band for the next 20 years and try to get as big as possible,” she says. “I think Big Thief’s going to be really creative in the future. 

Everything is democratic in our band, creatively and with business. Everything has to be agreed upon, which is so exhausting, and it takes so much more energy than just Adrianne or me being the bandleader. It was an evolution. At first, me and Adrianne built the band, so we led it together. Pretty quickly it became this unanimous democracy.”

The album covers for U.F.O.F. and Two Hands feature all four band members practically on top of each other, and that’s not a coincidence, that’s a message. “We saw the photos and we decided, ‘This is the simplest, most honest expression of who we are as a group of people,’” Meek says. “We just actually want to be that close together whenever we’re hanging out because we love each other.”  

Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, James Krivchenia, Max Oleartchik

Unless you support Wolverhampton Wanderers, you might not feel you’ve much in common with Robert Plant, a rock icon from a time when we expected our heroes to be anything but relatable. But what’s immediately apparent from our interview with Plant in the new issue of MOJO is he’s very like a typical MOJO reader: insatiably curious about music; enthusiastic about sharing his latest discoveries; honest enough to understand that while he knows and loves a lot, there’s always something else worth hearing.

MOJO joins Plant in the corner of a 15th century country pub, blasting North African electronica out of his phone. Later, he will talk candidly about how working with Alison Krauss revealed to him an enriching strain of American music that, in spite of his restless spirit of enquiry, he’d never previously explored. On the CD that comes with our new issue, Robert and Alison have chosen some of their favourite songs to illustrate how their contrasting musical worlds have come together in such striking harmony. “I knew nothing about the Louvin Brothers,” Plant admits.

Maybe you already know the Louvins well, and are schooled in some of the other musical worlds we explore this issue. The esoteric frenzies of Faust and Van Der Graaf Generator, say, or the devastating quietude of Low. The passion of Aretha Franklin or the fanatically contoured big music of The War On Drugs. Even the gems hiding in plain sight in Dylan’s much-maligned ‘80s catalogue. But this, in a way, is our mission: to find fresh stories and perspectives on the music that changed your life (if you were at Reading Festival in 1988, you won’t want to miss this MOJO!), and to point you towards a dozen new potential obsessions that might, in some small way, change it again.

Neal Francis’ sophomore album ‘In Plain Sight’ offers up a body of work both enchanting and painfully self-aware, recorded entirely on tape with his bandmates. Mixed by Grammy Award-winner Dave Fridmann (Spoon, Tame Impala, Flaming Lips), the album spotlights Francis’s refined yet free-spirited performance on piano, an instrument he took up at the age of four. The album came to life over the course of a tumultuous year spent living in a possibly haunted church in Chicago. The result: a portrait of profound upheaval and weary resilience, presented in a kaleidoscopic sound that’s endlessly absorbing. ‘In Plain Sight’ ultimately reveals the possibility of redemption and transformation even as your world falls apart.

“When I started the process of writing these songs, I was so emotionally out-of-sorts and really kind of hopeless that I’d be able to come up with anything,” says Francis. “But then I sat down and started working, and embraced whatever inspiration came my way. Sometimes it felt like beating my head against a wall, but I tried to trust that it would lead somewhere. The whole thing was like a weird dream—this very strange time of terrible, wonderful isolation.”

Releases November 5th, 2021

The new visual from Annie Clark features three bedazzled but lackadaisical dancers, a flasher, and Demi Adejuyigbe. Just last week, we got a look at a new project from Annie Clark with the trailer for “Nowhere Inn”, a rock-mockumentary about her life and music as St Vincent with the help of Carrie Brownstein. Today, we get another video, one from the album St. Vincent released a couple months ago called “Daddy’s Home” that’s indebted to the dirt-smudged sparkle of the ’70s. She has shared the video for the title track, which is charmingly bizarre.

As on the recent ‘Down and Out Downtown’ full length concert special streamed globally by Moment House, Daddy’s Home material will be brought to life alongside staples spanning the St. Vincent catalogue on her hotly anticipated U.S. tour.

St. Vincent will do some time on the road beginning September 

St. Vincent adds a slow flatbed ride to her breakneck paced fall schedule with the new video for “Daddy’s Home.”

The video features the musician preforming solo on a giant truck that parades her around in a square spanning four blocks. There’s also a trio of bedazzled, lackadaisical dancers. Then, a man in a khaki trench coat comes out and flashes St. Vincent while she’s performing. She screams, but it’s unclear if it’s because of the indecent shock or rock ‘n’ roll catharsis. Oh, I almost forgot the best part: comedian Demi Adejuyigbe makes an appearance a couple times reading comics in an office chair outside (no desk). He appears annoyed as St. Vincent makes her second lap. At the end, she waves to no one.

New York-based singer/songwriter Samia Finnerty’s, 2020 debut album, “The Baby”, was a testament to her impressive vocal might, irresistible tunefulness and vulnerable lyricism, both clever and illuminating in equal measure. Drawing widespread acclaim from the likes of pitchfork, stereogum, npr, nme, the sunday times, and others, the album more than delivered following the promise of early singles like 2018’s “Django” and 2019’s “Ode To Artifice.” Samia spent much of 2020 in self-reflection, and she also made various life changes that left her feeling more earnest and centered. during this time, she wrote a handful of songs that make up “Scout” ep. while “The Baby” leaned more on self-deprecating humour, “Scout” was born out of a need to “honour feeling secure in what [she] had to say.”

The EP is packed with reverence for life’s ups and downs, but more than anything, it’s an ode to loved ones. the compassionate glow of this ep partially stems from her new Nashville surroundings, as well as her recent experiences “feeling genuinely loved, making new friends, and holding onto old friendships.” it’s reminiscent of that reassuring exhale in the mirror after an imperfect yet fulfilling day. as Samia puts it, “Scout” is “the baby’s slightly older sister letting her know that everything is gonna be alright.”

The ep title is a nickname of Samia’s, and it’s a fitting nod to the record’s benevolence. “my partner calls me scout,” she explains. “it’s just a word that implies bravery to me. I always picture a little girl with a sash and badges basking in her autonomy selling samoas.” whether you’re a girl scout trying to gain confidence or an adult who needs reminders of our inability to make everyone happy or the untold power of being there for someone, this ep is an unashamed loving nudge.

12″ vinyl version of Scout. Pressed on translucent white vinyl. Edition of 300. Shipping August 13th, 2021.

Releases July 23rd, 2021

Willie Nile is a thoroughly relentless rocker, one who keeps a close personal tie to New York City and, in turn, the role the city’s played in moulding music’s modern trajectory. Like Springsteen and Pete Townsend, both of whom he’s forged ties with over the years, he excels at anthemic outcries that rally the masses with full fist-pumping frenzy. So it was only natural that in the midst of the pandemic, when the city he loves and has heralded for the past four decades should suffer its worth catastrophe since 9/11, he would share songs that affirm its resilience. 

Rather than succumb to that pressure and pain, Nile’s emerged with another masterwork, one that fully vets his unrelenting attitude, stark drive, and sheer abject enthusiasm. “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Sanctuary,” “Blood On Your Hands” (a driving duet with his New York neighbour Steve Earle), and the somewhat sardonic twosome “Off My Medication” and “Where There’s a Willie, There’s a Way” rank with the most riveting rockers he’s ever procured, underscored with additional ferocity that came in the face of the lockdown and the crippling effect it had on the city and its citizens. Determined and defiant, Nile makes it clear that his tenacity won’t be deterred.

In that regard, The Day The Earth Stood Still easily measures up to every one of Nile’s preceding efforts—taut, tough, and tenacious, and driven by sheer grit and gravitas, as well as passion and purpose. The music’s motivation is further stirred by the insistent surge of “The Justice Bell,” a song inspired by the late Congressman John Lewis, the decisive stance of “Expect Change,” and the closing three numbers that provide a further source of inspiration—the reflective “I Will Stand,” funk-fueled “Time To Be Great” and the searing, soaring “Way Of  the Heart.” The sentiments expressed in the latter offer an apt coda to the resolve shared in the album overall:

Reach out from the darkness /Step into the rising sun / And remember when you’re all alone / You’re not the only one. 

Those are thoughts well worth remembering, and they ring with real impact given the darkness and divide wrought by the crisis caused by COVID-19 and the social upheaval that’s impacted all facets of life at the same time. Nile is due thanks for keeping things moving even when the rest of the earth came to its standstill.

Willie Nile “The Day The Earth Stood Still” released on River House Records 

Her latest album as Lingua Ignota, Kristin Hayter burrowed deep into the landscape of rural Pennsylvania. Though the exact location of its genesis is not clear, “Sinner Get Ready” is crafted with Appalachian folk instruments and mired in the region’s traditional religious fervour. Interspersed with clips from televangelist sermons, this music examines the duality of blind devotion. Like so much of Hayter’s work, the record is also a text of discomfort; it was created during lockdown, following months of excruciating pain due to a spinal surgery. Even the instruments she worked with presented a unique challenge: The classically trained musician taught herself to play banjo and cello, stoking their sounds to ignite a torrid mythology.

On her previous Lingua Ignota album, 2019’s “Caligua” Hayter invoked Satan himself, commanding him to “fortify” her in a quest for retribution. It was an blistering tribute to oppressed women. For that album, Hayter enlisted members of The Body, Uniform and Full Of Hell, subjecting her operatic melodies to corrosive distortion and electronic manipulation. On “Sinner Get Ready“, Hayter confronts the inverse of Caligula, both formally and thematically. She forgoes digital processing for simpler tools: A menacing organ, an animal-skin drum, penny whistle. Hayter either subverts these instruments or leans into their ecclesiastical implications. The result, as those who’ve encountered the full-tilt of religious fanaticism know, are just as frightening.

The record’s arrangements are as stringent and severe as their environment: this Pennsylvania is a place of harsh isolation, curious history and haunting folklore which, as Hayter sings, spans hermetic cloisters, murderous ironmasters and a hellish mine fire ceaselessly burning underground.

Hayter does not call upon the devil on Sinner Get Ready, but her portrayal of God is ruthless. Like the Jehovah of the Old Testament, or the deities of ancient Greece, he is a vengeful, violent presence. On “Many Hands,” over a dirge of bowed zither and scraped guitar strings, Hayter shifts between the perspective of this severe being and a submissive devotee. “Upon your pale pale body I will put many hands,” she sings, recounting the word of God. “And rough, rough fingers for every hole you have.” The song builds into a percussive clatter, a hailstorm of cymbals and castanets and bells that Hayter sourced from nearby antique stores. The din collides with her multi-tracked vocals, which ebb and rise like the rhythmic call-and-response of a fiery church service. In a lull between vibrant bursts of harmony, Hayter stretches her voice above the creeping drone.

Hayter continues this exploration in “Repent Now Confess Now,” an ambling ballad led by spare piano and surges of cello. She assumes the role of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, reminding congregants that “this body is not your home.” “The surgeon’s precision is nothing,” she sings. “No wound as sharp as the will of God.” But as much as Sinner Get Ready claws at the concept of an all-powerful entity, it also points a sharpened fingernail at the dangerously pious. “The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata” opens with a clip of CNN’s Gary Tuchmanm interviewing Ohio churchgoers about the risks of gathering during the COVID-19 outbreak. When asked if she is concerned about getting sick, one woman responds, “No. I’m covered in Jesus’ blood.”

These spoken segments burble beneath the surface, never overshadowing the music. Instead, they magnify a subtle kind of terror. In “The Sacred Linament of Judgement,” we hear televangelist Jimmy Swaggart apologize to his followers for sexual improprieties. Before he can complete his speech, an audience member shouts “Get off the stage!” with blood-curdling ire. At the beginning of “Man Is Like a Spring Flower,” Hayter places a recording of the sex worker who brought Swaggart’s indiscretions to light. Yet Hayter’s deep respect for devotional music, as performed in “The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata,” recontextualizes her harsh depictions of piety: the grand, major key hymnal is an ode to paradise found. Soaring over braided woodwinds and plucked mandolins, Hayter’s voice attempts to transcend pains of the flesh. She sings of a delusion—but a lovely one. Unlike the spiteful divinity that stalks these songs, Hayter’s music is full of reverence and empathy for our most challenging task: to be human.

This album is the best of 2021. Beautiful, awe-inspiring, and frightening. From the upcoming album “Sinner Get Ready”, out August 6th via Sargent House Records