The Fat Angel Sings

Eric Clapton’s self-titled debut solo album originally released in August 1970 is to be released in an special Anniversary Edition set due on August 20th, 2021. It will present this important staging post in his epic career in three separate mixes: The Eric Clapton Mix, the Delaney Bramlett Mix and the Tom Dowd Mix (The UK Version). The Eric Clapton mix is being released in full for the first time. Wedged in between Cream and Blind Faith on one side and Derek and the Dominoes on the other, 

The new edition was introduced today by the arrival of two tracks, “After Midnight” (Delaney Bramlett Mix) and “Blues Power” (Eric Clapton Mix).

These include “Teasin’” by King Curtis with Delaney Bramlett, Eric Clapton & Friends, “I’ve Told You For The Last Time” (Olympic Studios version), and the single B-side “Groupie (Superstar)” by Delaney & Bonnie & Friends featuring Eric Clapton.

The Eric Clapton mix version is being released in full for the first time. The album will be available on 4CD and 1LP (standard black) and will also be released digitally.

This anniversary collection also includes some singles, alternate versions and session outtakes. These include a previously-unreleased Alternate Mix of “Comin’ Home” by Delaney & Bonnie & Friends featuring Eric Clapton. Other tracks among these bonus tracks were previously released on the Deluxe Edition CD of the album in 2005.

Clapton’s eponymous solo debut was recorded after he completed a tour with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends Eric used the core of the duo’s backing band and co-wrote the majority of the songs with Delaney Bramlett accordingly, The sounds more laid-back and straightforward than any of the guitarist’s previous recordings. There are still elements of blues and rock & roll, but they’re hidden beneath layers of gospel, R&B, country, and pop flourishes. And the pop element of the record is the strongest of the album’s many elements 

The 1970 album came as Clapton was resetting his musical priorities, as he had toured with Delaney & Bonnie and others in the lead-up to the establishment of his next venture Derek and the Dominios later that year. Beside Clapton, Bramlett and Leon Russell, the personnel includes the other members of Clapton’s 1970 band Derek and the Dominos as well as guest spots from Stephen Stills, Rita Coolidge, Bonnie Bramlett, Sonny Curtis and others. The album reached No.13 on the Billboard LP chart, in a 30-week stay that put Clapton’s name on the big sellers as a soloist for the first time.

On Tuesday, June 8th, HarperCollins will publish “The Collected Works of  jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts and Lyrics”, a nearly 600 page approved by his estate collection that pulls together most of the Doors singer’s previously published work. It features everything from song lyrics to poetry, his posthumous poetry collections (Wilderness and The American Night), and a trove of unpublished handwritten material culled from 28 recently discovered notebooks.

Ahead of the book’s release, Morrison’s previously unreleased poem and the collection’s epilogue “As I Look Back,” an autobiographical piece written in verse form where the singer reminisces on his life and career, from his childhood in a military family to his days with the Doors to his dreams of a post-music life.

“The joy of performing has ended. Joy of films is pleasure of writing,” Morrison writes. “End w/fond good-bye & plans for future — Not an actor writer — filmmaker.”

“The Collected Works of  jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts and Lyrics”  also boasts Morrison’s treatment for his unrealized film project The Hitchhiker, unseen family photographs, a transcript and pictures from Morrison’s final poetry recording session, and what are believed to be Morrison’s final writings — the contents of a Paris notebook from shortly before his 1971 death, “reproduced in full reading size.”

The Doors’ famed studio album “Morrison Hotel” recently celebrated its 50th Anniversary, unearthing rare session tapes from the original recording sessions.  Exclusively for RSD Drops 2021, “Morrison Hotel Sessions” will be pressed on vinyl for the first time, offering listeners a fly-on-the-wall experience to hear The Doors create “Roadhouse Blues,” “Peace Frog/Blue Sunday” and “Queen Of The Highway” from this masterpiece album. The limited edition package – which was mixed and assembled by The Doors original engineer Bruce Botnick – is pressed on 180g double vinyl and also features new liner notes from Botnick. Strictly limited and numbered to 16,000 copies worldwide.

SIDE ONE: BLACK DRESSED IN LEATHER (Queen Of The Highway Sessions) – First Session (11/15/68): 1. QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAY (Take 1), 2. QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAY (Various Takes), 3. QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAY (Take 44). Second Session (1/16/69): 4. QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAY (Take 12), 5. QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAY (Take 14)

SIDE TWO: Third Session (Date unknown): 1. QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAY (TAKE 1), 2. QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAY (TAKES 5, 6 & 9), 3. QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAY (TAKE 14), 4. I WILL NEVER BE UNTRUE, 5. QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAY (TAKE UNKNOWN) | MONEY BEATS SOUL (Roadhouse Blues Sessions) – First Session: 6. Roadhouse Blues (Take 14)

SIDE THREE: Second Session: 1. MONEY (THAT’S WHAT I WANT), 2. ROCK ME BABY. Third Session: 3. ROADHOUSE BLUES (TAKES 6 & 7), 4.ROADHOUSE BLUES (TAKE 8)

SIDE FOUR: Fourth Session: 1. ROADHOUSE BLUES (TAKES 1 & 2), 2. ROADHOUSE BLUES (TAKES 5, 6 & 14) | Dawn’s Highway (Peace Frog/Blue Sunday Session) 3. PEACE FROG/BLUE SUNDAY (TAKE 4), 4. PEACE FROG (TAKE 12)

Exclusively for Record Store Day’s Drops on June 12th, 2021 Morrison Hotel Sessions will be pressed on vinyl for the first time, offering listeners a fly-on-the-wall experience to hear The Doors create “Roadhouse Blues,” “Peace Frog/Blue Sunday” and “Queen Of The Highway” . The limited edition package – which was mixed and assembled by The Doors original engineer Bruce Botnick – is pressed on 180gram, double vinyl and also features new liner notes from Botnick.

Montreal has been home to many psychedelic acts over the years, and Mothland has emerged in recent years as the scene’s nucleus. Since the organization was founded in 2017, they’ve served as a booking agency, an artist management firm and a record label, taking whatever means necessary to spread Montreal’s psych vibes to the world. Now, they’ve brought many of the scene’s biggest names together for their first mixtape, “Sounds from Mothland Volume I”, .

The mixtape features Montreal psych acts like Birds Of Paradise, Paul Jacobs, Yoo Doo Right, The High Dials, Red Mass and UUBBUURRUU along with a few contributors from beyond the city limits, including Quebec City’s Victime, Tel Aviv-born Gladys Lazer and Belgium’s Le Prince Harry.

Along with the announcement, Mothland have previously shared the mixtape tracks by Paul Jacobs — who also drew the mixtape’s artwork — and Yoo Doo Right.

“Thanks,” Jacobs’ off-kilter tune, stays true to his fuzzy, buoyant DIY rock stylings. In a statement, Jacobs says: that the song is “about appreciating the moments of creative inspiration, and acknowledging the fact that it comes and goes.” As for the arrangement, he says, “I wanted to record some beats in 5/8 and track some bass on top. Figured I’d add some guitar since I have one. Then I thought, a shaker would really get this going. Next thing you know I’m singing on the dang thing. After that point, why not add some synth?”

Yoo Doo Right’s contribution to the mixtape, “Marche Pt. 3,” is a collaboration with Ottawa’s Jasmine Trails, fitting her dreamy, soulful vocals on top of the band’s jammy, kraut-adjacent explorations. Say the band, “This track was our response to Mothland’s request for an irregular [track]/B-side/demo that would put us outside of our usual comfort zones. With the thought of making a disco song, ‘Marche Pt. 3’ is what came out of it. We immediately knew we wanted to collaborate with Jasmine Trails on this track, adding her breathy, enchanted approach to the song.”

More than just an agency, Mothland is an extra-dimensional space, a frame of mind, but even more so a tight-knit family sharing new sounds, colours and textures through multiple art forms and unique events. The collective also aims to provide visionary artists in the psychedelic, experimental and art pop genres, with an alternative label

Inspired by the pounding rhythmic improvisations found in krautrock, experimental trio Yoo Doo Right wed noisy, melodic guitar parts, effect-heavy synthesizer soundscapes, nonchalant bass grooves and patented percussive furies into a literal wall of sound. Solemn, chin-to-chest vocals dance in and out of the primordial sonic spectrum, creating a warm pillow to rest a weary head upon.

Named after a song from Can’s 1969 debut Monster Movie, The Montreal, Canadian band Yoo Doo Right are truly something special. Their debut album “Don’t Think You Can Escape Your Purpose” melds post-rock’s twisty mystique with krautrock’s contagious pummelling and space rock’s hypnotic drone. Sometimes vigorous and verging on total collapse and sometimes delicate and measured, it’s a gift that never stops giving. They really nail this push and pull on the seven-minute scorcher “1N914,” a brawny yet intricate track that folds in shoegaze and psych. “Join, Be Curst” even taps into dusty death rock, while mighty closer “Black Moth” adopts doom metal throbs. While many post-rock or psych artists are content with merely trotting out these genres’ respective tropes, Yoo Doo Right are hellbent on breaking new ground. With their ever-evolving, smouldering guitars and synth tidal waves, you never know what’s coming down the pike with this album—apart from impressive musicianship and dynamic song writing—but rarely does a note or mood feel out of place.

Part interstellar ear-worms, part sonic experimentations, their upcoming opus sees the trio relentlessly chase, and successfully capture, the very essence of their art, resulting in layered bombastic tracks ranging from mechanical krautrock to audacious space rock.

Released May 21st, 2021

As of this year, the band formerly known as Whoop-Sza are now releasing music as Status/Non-Status, a reference to bandleader Adam Sturgeon’s identity as a non-status Indigenous person. Their 2019 album Warrior Down was a gnarled, melodic affair that grappled with the modern realities of colonialism, and it was listed for the polaris Music prize the following year. Now with a new EP “1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years“, this is their first project as Status/Non-Status, they sound just as mercurial as before. One minute they’re playing a gentle acoustic song with pretty, multi-tracked vocals “Find a Home” and the next, they’re breaking into a frightful, heady jam that bares its sharp teeth “Genocidio”.

With illuminating, passionate storytelling and a sonic curiosity that blurs the line between grunge, psych, folk and noise, Sturgeon impresses yet again.

From the extended play recording – 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years Recorded in Jalisco province, Guadalajara MX Out May 28th You’ve Changed Records/Grizzlar

Francesca Brierley’s new EP as heka, the plainly titled “(a),” may be unassuming, but it snakes its way inside your psyche pretty quickly. These four lo-fi tracks contain a mesmerizing calm and an emotional frankness that stares you in the face and wrestles with the aftermath of pain. Though the EP’s ambient textures delight and heal, the central frameworks of heka’s songs are always constructed to thrive on their own. The opening track “(a) mask” rests on sombre, folky melodies that would be just as arresting via soft, a cappella hum, even when her voice swerves towards misty auto-tune intonations.

Through light hisses, pronounced echos, what sound like castanets and other instrumental flutters, her compassionate vocal performance absolutely steals the show on “(a) dab,” a grisly tale about an unhealthy romance spiraling out of control. Though not without unexpected sonic treasures, the magic of (a) rests on Brierley’s full-hearted belief in the powerful simplicity of her songs.

This is my first EP as a producer, so .. exciting times, Thank you to Phil, Paddy and Tobi for helping me release these songs, to Ed Tullett and Jemima Coulter for lending their musical talents and to Dandysounds Recordings for the awesome master.

Released on: 19th May 2021

Today is the release date for “Time Is Being”, a dreamy & meditative electronic pop album by Salt Lake City-based songwriter, musician, tattooer, and fine artist Jill Whit has developed a far-reaching yet comprehensive artistic practice rooted in intimacy. But the focus has rarely been as personal as it has this past year. The opening months of the pandemic brought solitude, and with it a newfound focus on the self. What emerged from the period is time is being, a brand new record to be released this spring on Orindal Records.

Entirely self-recorded, the album strives to create the most fertile conditions in which to explore one’s interior state, blending the lo-fi sensibilities of bedroom pop with elements of ambient to form the bedrock upon which Whit’s lyricism and spoken-word poetry can flourish. While the release is at least in part formed around the dissolution of a relationship, it inverts its focus, rejecting the traditional outward gaze of longing.

A multi-disciplinary artist from Salt Lake City, Jill Whit moves between artistic styles, experimenting in music, fine art and tattooing, to name but a few. Jill’s latest project is a “bedroom ambient”, electronic-pop album, time is being and it is due out later this month on Orindal Records. The release was recently announced alongside two brilliant singles, “Touchless” and “Maybe Means No”, Though written amid the dying embers of the relationship, ‘Maybe Means No’, is a natural progression from the previous track.

Contemplating fleeing the present for new time and space, the song works up the courage to make a decision, growing brighter as it edges over the precipice of hesitancy into freefall. The drop might be sudden, the song suggests, and must be experienced alone, but there is feeling in such a descent.

Jill Whit is premiering the latest track from the album, Internet Cowboy. “Internet Cowboy”, a sense of brightness and positivity is instant, even if it is underlain with a certain intrinsic wistfulness. The track opens on a pulse of a keyboard, and Jill’s reverberating vocal, “there is light, even at the ending”. The single then seems to meander and flow through a variety of electronic landscapes, mirroring the lyrical content, “your love is so simple, like a river that runs, while I’m standing still”. As the track gently fades out, it seems to leave a warm after-glow, a feeling of hopefulness and the most underrated emotion, contentment. 

“time is being”, the new album by Jill Whit, is out May 28th, 2021 on Orindal Records.

After a five-year break from songwriting, Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz experienced a surge of creativity not long ago, creating an ambitious group of songs that flowed into each other.

The result is the four-track Butter Miracle, Suite One, due May 21st, which will be the band’s first release since 2014’s Somewhere Under Wonderland. The first single, “Elevator Boots,” available now, is a melodic, wistful ode to life on tour, with a sound that somehow manages to bridge the gap between the Band and Mott the Hoople.

During his long creative hiatus, Duritz found a degree of personal contentment that long eluded him. “I’ve been quite happy,” he says. “I’ve been in a relationship for four or five years now — one that is very satisfying, and healthy. Most of my experiences in my life had been what it’s like to be alone and live alone. And that’s not the case anymore. That’s a big change for me, to really come to the idea that maybe something’s more important than writing songs.”

Despite a lifetime as a “city kid” — as an adult, he went from San Francisco to Los Angeles to his current home in New York City — he started spending a lot of time at a friend’s farm in the English countryside. While Duritz and his girlfriend were staying there in 2019, he suddenly shaved his head on a whim, removing his trademark dreadlocks. “I got rid of my beard, too,” he says. “I just wanted to see myself. I didn’t want to be hiding behind a beard or the dreads.” Not long afterward, he rented a piano and started writing music again.

The first song he wrote was the unusual, free-flowing track “Tall Grass,” which begins as a sort of dirge – recounting a real-life experience of hunting rabbits on that farm — before exploding into the Crows’ version of arena-rock, a la 1996’s Recovering the Satellites. That song flowed straight into “Elevator Boots,” which in turn led to “Angel of 14th Street,” a song about his experience of leaving Los Angeles for New York years ago, albeit told through a female narrator. “Get up out of your memories,” Duritz sings — a line with great personal significance.

“Everything we did makes us who we are,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we have to drag it around like it’s a ball and chain. I made a lot of mistakes in my life. And you know, living with a mental illness, it just hampers a lot of shit.” (He’s been open about a diagnosis of dissociative disorder.) “But you can spend all your time thinking how you could have done it better, or you can try and live a different kind of life.”

The final song, “Bobby and the Rat-Kings,” is a companion to “Elevator Boots.” “They’re both about loving rock & roll,” he says. “One’s from the perspective of the guy playing and the other is kind of the perspective of a fan, both of which I’ve lived in my life.”

The song suite will eventually be the first half of a full Counting Crows album, with another suite filling the second half. “I’m writing the second one now,” Duritz says.

After scrapping touring plans along with the rest of the world last year, Counting Crows are tentatively eyeing this fall, if Duritz can be convinced it’s safe. But as usual, he’s wary of Nineties nostalgia: “At a certain point, are we just a legacy act that should go play greatest shows or not? I mean, to me, I have no interest in it. We still annoy the shit out of people by not doing it. We went on our 25th-anniversary tour and played obscure shit!”

“Elevator Boots” is Counting Crows‘ newest single off their upcoming “Butter Miracle Suite One“, out May 21st.