When Rachel Angel sings “I wanna be a renegade,” she is speaking to the experience of personal transformation and resilience, like putting on a protective coat of armour to meet the world with grace and courage. While the songs on the EP were inspired by the spirit of outlaw country, her sense of the outlaw is metaphorical rather than literal. These songs are about taking the unconventional artists path, and staring in the face of danger, fear, and pain. In her latest EP “Highway Songs,” the country-folk troubadour takes the listener on a wild journey— physical, emotional, spiritual, and everywhere in between.
These songs were written in the midst of a harrowing time for Angel— she was physically sick with an auto-immune disease, self-quarantined in her Brooklyn apartment, writing at a feverish pace. She reflected on her recent travels, both as a touring musician, and time spent in Mexico during a 7.1 earthquake with her family.
“Highway Songs” was recorded live in two days with an all star lineup at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn, NY.
Released August 21st, 2020 The Band:
Rachel Angel – Vocals/Guitar
Brian Betancourt – Bass
Sam Owens – Lead Guitar/Keys
Noah Hecht – Drums
Dan Iead – Pedal Steel Guitar
Clyde Daley – Trumpet on “Mexico”All songs written by Rachel Angel (BMI)
As of this week, Ian Sweet, the project of Jilian Medford has found a new label. “Welcome to the family, Ian Sweet,” tweeted Polyvinyl. And the only way to properly celebrate is with a new song,“
In the song, Medford knows her relationship isn’t good for her. “I’m a dumb driver/when I’m in love/I run all the red lights,” she sings over mid-tempo drums and regretful synths. Eventually the music swells as she admits her folly: “I want to stop, I want to,” she sings, engaging the full band for a mini-breakdown.
“‘Dumb Driver’ is an examination and grieving of, both during and after, a broken relationship,” Medford says in a press release. “It describes the toxic cycle of being so overtaken by your love for someone that you put yourself in harm’s way for it—like a car crash you can’t look away from. On ‘Dumb Driver’ I am pleading with myself to stop the car, pull over, and get out of the situation before the damage is irreversible.”
“After pulling myself from some massive wreckage, I want to throw a party and sing about it,” she says
The French indie-poppers Phoenix have returned with “Identical”, their first new single since 2017’s Ti Amo. Phoenix have returned with “Identical”, their first new single in three years. The indie-poppers has been recording at Motorbass Studios in Paris, and if “Identical” is any indication, they’re more exuberant than ever. The song uses club-ready drums and slowly-building synthesizers to induce even the most sedentary of butts to start wiggling. The emotiveness of the song makes it perfect for a certain kind of pop movie soundtrack, and indeed, it’s already landed a place in Sofia Coppolas’ upcoming On the Rocks.
Phoenix have been recording at Motorbass Studios in Paris, and if “Identical” is any indication, the band is more exuberant than ever. The song uses club-ready drums and slowly-building synthesizers to induce even the most sedentary of butts to start wiggling. This marks the fifth collaboration between that director and this band, in a partnership that dates back to the use of “Too Young” in 2003’s Lost In Translation. (Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars is also married to Coppola.) The accompanying video was directed by another Coppola — that would be Roman — who previously helmed visuals for “Funky Squaredance”, “Long Distance Call”, and “Everything Is Everything”. Here, he chooses to keep it simple; some men just want to light a shirt on fire and watch it burn. In On the Rocks, Jones plays a woman who fears her husband (played by Wayans) is having an affair. Enter her dad (played by Murray), a womanizer who helps Jones investigate if her husband really is unfaithful. Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars is married to Coppola and hence their music is often in her films.
Both song and video for “Identical” are dedicated to Phoenix’s late collaborator, producer and Cassius member Philippe Zdar.
Sometimes it feels like you hear a Bright Eyes song with your whole body. From Conor Oberst’s early recordings in an Omaha basement in 1995 all the way up to 2020, Bright Eyes’ music tries to unravel the impossible tangles of dissent: personal and political, external and internal. It’s a study of the beauty in unsteadiness in all its forms – in a voice, beliefs, love, identity, and what fills up the spaces in-between. And in so many ways, it’s just about searching for a way through. When Bright Eyes announced their first new album since 2011, the media excitedly reported on the band’s reconciliation. But, in reality, Bright Eyes never really broke up. They wandered in different directions, sure, but there were no hard feelings. Gathering to record Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was was a matter of good timing and schedules aligning. Frontman Conor Oberst suggested the idea for a new record at bandmate Nathaniel Walcott’s Christmas party in 2017, and the pair called the third member of their trio Mike Mogis from the bathroom to pitch the idea.
The year 2020 is full of significant anniversaries for Bright Eyes. Fevers and Mirrors was released 20 years ago this May, while Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning both turned 15 years old in January. The latter, a singer-songwriter tour-de-force released amidst the Bush presidency and Iraq war, wades through incisive anti-war rhetoric and micro, intimate calamities. On the title track and throughout the record, Oberst sings about body counts in the newspaper, televised wars, the bottomless pit of American greed, struggling to understand the world alongside one’s own turmoil. In its own way, I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning carved out its place in the canon of great anti-war albums by being both present and prophetic, its urgency enduring 15 years later.
In 2011 the release of The People’s Key, Bright Eyes’ ninth and most recent album, ushered in an unofficial hiatus for the beloved project. In the time since, the work of the band’s core members – Oberst, multi-instrumentalist Mike Mogis, and multi-instrumentalist Nathaniel Walcott – has remained omnipresent, through both the members’ original work and collaboration.
In recent years, Mogis produced records for beloved folk acts First Aid Kit and Joseph, among others, as well as mixed the fine-spun ennui of Phoebe Bridgers’ breakthrough 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps. Mogis and bandmate Walcott also teamed up to write the original scores for The Fault in Our Stars, Stuck in Love, and Lovely Still, and Walcott worked as a solo composer scoring number of independent feature-length films. Walcott spent extensive time on collaboration; in addition to his arrangement work for Mavis Staples, First Aid Kit, and M. Ward, he contributed studio work to artists ranging from U2 to jazz guitarist Jeff Parker, and also toured heavily as a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Oberst, who’s nearly 30 years into a prolific musical career, spent the last decade in similarly productive fashion. Across three years he released a string of solo albums: Salutations (2017), Ruminations (2016), and Upside Down Mountain (2014), as well as guested on records by First Aid Kit, Phoebe Bridgers, and Alt-J. His punk band, Desaparecidos, emerged from a 13-year hiatus in 2015 with the thunderous sophomore LP, Payola, a white-knuckled disarray of hollered political fury. And at the top of 2019, Oberst and Bridgers debuted their new band, Better Oblivion Community Center, digitally dropping the critically-lauded eponymous debut LP alongside a surprise performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
The heart at Bright Eyes’ songwriting still looms culturally, in films and TV shows and through re-imaginings by other artists. Mac Miller covered both Lua and First Day of My Life; Lorde’s version of the penultimate The People’s Key track, the funereal-waltz Ladder Song, was a focal point of The Hunger Games’ soundtrack; The Killers covered Four Winds for their Spaceman EP; and Lil Peep’s Worlds Away samples Something Vague while Young Thug’s Me Or Us samples First Day of My Life.
Bright Eyes’ expansive catalogue has traversed genre, sound, and countless players; unpolished demos or fuzzy folk, electrified rock or country twang. The sharp song writing and musicianship is all anchored in Bright Eyes’ singular ability to flip deep intimacy into something universal. For so many, for so long, listening to Bright Eyes has been like hearing yourself in someone else’s song – a moment of understanding or illumination, knowing you’re on the same team looking for a way to move through of all this shit.
And while 2020 is a year of milestones for the band, it’s also the year Bright Eyes returns, newly signed to indie label Dead Oceans. Amidst the current overwhelming uncertainty and upheaval of global and personal worlds, Oberst, Mogis, and Walcott reunited under the moniker as both an escape from, and a confrontation of, trying times. Getting the band back together felt right, and necessary, and the friendship at the core of the band has been a long time pillar of Bright Eyes’ output. For Bright Eyes, this long-awaited re-emergence feels like coming home.
They certainly did some of their best work on Down In The Weeds… The album sounds undeniably like a Bright Eyes record, but it ebbs and flows with new anxieties and darknesses. Fans will delight in a true-to-style Bright Eyes record, but, at the same time, any music fan will be able to appreciate the gruesome grandeur of this folk-rock mastery.
Bright Eyes’s Down in the Weeds, Where the World OnceWas feels less like a monumental happening and more like a seamless continuation, the sound of a band shrugging off a long hiatus and simply getting back to work. They’re still making deeply emotional indie rock songs, still flirting with the same grandiosity that helped cement the legacies of albums like Lifted and Fevers and Mirrors, and the songs still revolve around Conor Oberst’s warbling search for the reasons we insist on continuing to exist when the world quite frankly seems to be crumbling all around us. No matter how much time has passed, Bright Eyes continues to be unmatched at tackling the biggest questions with a profound, heart-wrenching intimacy.
Jay Som mastermind Melina Duterte stars in the Han Hale-directed video as a weary traveling musician (a role she is well-equipped to play!) who, asleep in her band’s touring van, dreams she’s the leader of a group of suit-clad special agents on their way to investigate a mysterious, crop circle-esque pattern that has appeared in the wilderness. “Shifting through the nighttime drive / We’ll be just fine,” Duterte sings, her breathy vocals evoking the blurry state of being in between—sleep and waking, one city and another, late night and early morning—over gauzy guitars, playful bass plucks, and judiciously deployed piano and strings. Meanwhile, the video dives deeper and deeper into her imagination, ultimately uncovering the supernatural truth at the heart of the mystery.
Melina Duterte says that her single as Jay Som, “Nighttime Drive,” “basically encapsulated my entire life for the past two years.” It’s the latest slice of mellow dream pop from her sophomore album, Anak Ko, that came out August .
“Nighttime Drive” is taken from Jay Som’s new album, Anak Ko, out August 2019.
Death Valley Girls are an indie rock quartet from Los Angeles, Calif. Through their punk-infused, fuzzy garage rock sound, they’ve caught the attention of Iggy Pop, who’s called the group “a gift to the world.” He even starred in their video for the single “Disaster (Is What We’re After).” While singer and multi-instrumentalist Bonnie Bloomgarden and guitarist Larry Schemel knew their intention for the album before a single note was written, the actual nature and direction of the music was a mystery. The initial inspiration for the record came from the jubilant spirit of Ethiopian funk records the band had been listening to on tour, but once they began to channel the songs it seemed like the music came from somewhere not in the past but in the future. In the weeks leading up to recording, Death Valley Girls relied on their subconscious and effortlessly conjured Under the Spell of Joy’s eleven tracks as if they’d tapped into the Akashic Chronicle and pulled the music from the ether.
The rockers have teamed up with the legendary shoe company Dr. Martens for a special mini-doc as part of their new Dr. Martens Music & Film Series. In the video, vocalist Bonnie Bloomgarden, guitarist Larry Schemel, bassist Nikki Pickle and drummer Rikki Styxx give a brief summary of their mission as a band, and there are also clips of the energetic live performances.
Death Valley girls recently released their new single “Dream Cleaver,”
“Making music and being in a band is like a religious conviction,” the band said in a Q&A with Dr. Martens. “We are nomads for most of the year, and a gang, and that’s the way we like it! When you travel around spreading the good word of rock and roll you are like a missionary!”. The album opens with “Hypnagogia,” an ode to the space between sleep and wakefulness where we are open to other realms of consciousness. The song slowly builds along a steady pulse provided by bassist Pickle (Nicole Smith) and drummer Rikki Styxx. Tripped out saxophone bleats from guest player Gabe Flores swirl on top of the organ drones laid out by guest keyboardist Gregg Foreman.
The band’s choral objectives for Under the Spell of Joy are established right off the bat, with Bloomgarden’s melodic invocations bolstered by a choir, giving the album a rich and vibrant wall-of-sound aesthetic. The song ominously builds on its hypnotic foundation until it opens up into a raucous revelry at the four-minute mark. The portentous simmer of the opening track yields to the ecstatic rocker “Hold My Hand,” where verses reminiscent of Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting For The Man” explode into big triumphant choruses. From there the band launches into the title track, which marries the griminess of The Stooges with an innocence provided by a children’s choir chanting the album’s primary mantra “under the spell of joy / under the spell of love.”
Death Valley Girls have always vacillated between lightness and darkness, and on “Bliss Out” they demonstrate their current exuberant focus with a patina-hued pop song driven by an irrepressibly buoyant organ line laid down by keyboardist The Kid (Laura Kelsey). A similar cosmic euphoria is obtained on “The Universe,” where alternating chords on the organ help elevate soaring saxophone and keyboard lines out beyond the stratosphere. If you’re looking for transcendental rock music, look no further.
Death Valley Girls Under the Spell of Joy out October 2nd, 2020, on Suicide Squeeze Records
The Doors went back to basics when they checked into Morrison Hotel for their 1970 studio album. The band’s fifth LP, it’s now being reissued by Rhino on October 9th as a 2-CD/1-LP 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. This release follows the label’s similar reissues for The Doors’ first four albums including The Soft Parade which expanded their sound to include orchestration. Morrison Hotel got them back to blues-rock in striking fashion.
The box set features original engineer Bruce Botnick’s remastered version of the 1970 album produced by Paul Rothschild on both CD and vinyl. While Morrison Hotel didn’t yield any major chart hits – “You Make Me Real” b/w “Roadhouse Blues” only made it to No. 50 on the Billboard Hot 100 – it’s since been recognized as a powerful full-length album statement. Henry Diltz’s cover photography has since become one of rock’s most familiar images. The LP made it to No. 4 on the albums chart, and became the band’s highest-charting album in the United Kingdom with its No. 12 berth.
The new box set expands the original album with a second disc of 19 outtakes – totalling more than one hour’s worth of session material. Botnick states in the press release, “There are many takes, different arrangements, false starts, and insightful studio conversations between the band – who were in the studio – and producer Paul Rothchild – who was in the control room. It’s like being a fly on the wall.”
Disc Two kicks off with three sessions for “Queen of the Highway” and continues with another three for “Roadhouse Blues,” arguably the album’s most beloved track. The latter song evolved with different bass players including Soft Parade veteran Harvey Brooks and Lonnie Mack. The pseudonymous John Sebastian (appearing as “G. Puglese”) appeared on the final take with Mack on bass. The disc concludes with the “Peace Frog”/”Blue Sunday” session. Along the way, the set presents the previously released outtake “I Will Never Be Untrue” (indicated here as in an unissued version or mix) and outtake jams on Barrett Strong’s Motown classic “Money (That’s What I Want)” and B.B. King’s “Rock Me Baby.”
David Fricke has penned the liner notes which place the album in the context of its creation, when legal troubles plagued Jim Morrison and threatened to curtail the band’s activity. The Morrison Hotel: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is due from Rhino on October 9th. You’ll find pre-order links and the track listing below!
The Doors, Morrison Hotel: Deluxe Edition (Elektra/Rhino, 2020) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada)
CD 1: The Original Album (Elektra EKS-75007, 1970)
Side One: Hard Rock Cafe
“Roadhouse Blues”
“Waiting For The Sun”
“You Make Me Real”
“Peace Frog”
“Blue Sunday”
“Ship Of Fools”
Side Two: Morrison Hotel
“Land Ho!”
“The Spy”
“Queen Of The Highway”
“Indian Summer”
“Maggie M’Gill”
CD 2: Mysterious Union
Black Dressed In Leather (“Queen Of The Highway” Sessions)
First Session (11/15/68)
“Queen Of The Highway” (Take 1, She Was A Princess) *
“Queen Of The Highway” (Various Takes) *
“Queen Of The Highway” (Take 44, He Was A Monster) *
Second Session (1/16/69)
“Queen Of The Highway” (Take 12, No One Could Save Her) *
“Queen Of The Highway” (Take 14, Save The Blind Tiger) *
Third Session (Date Unknown)
“Queen Of The Highway” (Take 1, American Boy – American Girl) *
“Queen Of The Highway” (Takes 5, 6 & 9, Dancing Through The Midnight Whirlpool) *
“Queen Of The Highway” (Take 14, Start It All Over) *
“I Will Never Be Untrue” *
“Queen Of The Highway” (Take Unknown) *
Money Beats Soul (“Roadhouse Blues” Sessions)
First Session
“Roadhouse Blues” (Take 14, Keep Your Eyes On The Road) *
“Money (That’s What I Want)” *
“Rock Me Baby” *
Second Session
“Roadhouse Blues” (Takes 6 & 7, Your Hands Upon The Wheel) *
“Roadhouse Blues” (Take 8, We’re Goin’ To The Roadhouse) *
Third Session
“Roadhouse Blues” (Takes 1 & 2, We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time) *
“Roadhouse Blues” (Takes 5, 6 & 14, Let It Roll Baby Roll) *
Dawn’s Highway (Peace Frog/Blue Sunday Session)
To celebrate 50 years of Thin Lizzy Universal Music are proud to announce the first instalment of an archive release programme that will cover the career of one of the most iconic and respected bands of the 1970s.
“Rock Legends” is a six CD one DVD Super Deluxe Edition that features 99 Tracks in total, 74 of which are unreleased and 83 of which have never been released on CD or streaming. It is simply the ultimate Thin Lizzy boxset. Rock Legends’ covers the bands whole career over 6 discs newly mastered by Andy Pearce encompassing a raft of unreleased material including demos, radio sessions, live recordings and rare single edits. The track listing has been compiled by Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham and Lizzy expert Nick Sharp from a collection of newly discovered tapes most of which have never been heard before.
‘Running Back (Demo)’ is a previously unreleased track taken from Thin Lizzy‘ forthcoming “Rock Legends” box set.
The song is from the band’s breakthrough Jailbreak album from 1976 and was for a time being considered as the first single before Thin Lizzy opted for ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’ (good choice!). This unheard demo features saxophone which was not used on the released version, as well as some alternate vocals, guitar takes and keyboard parts.
The box is housed in a 10” x 6” slipcase and in addition to the six CDs contains a DVD with the hour long ‘Bad Reputation’ BBC documentary and the band’s legendary performance on the Rod Stewart ‘A Night on the Town’ TV Special from 1976. This DVD looks good too. As well as the Bad Reputation documentary which went out on BBC Four a few years back, we get four songs – ‘Jailbreak’, ‘Emerald’, ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’, and ‘Rosalie/Cowgirl Song’ – that were recorded for Rod Stewart’s A Night On The Town TV special in 1976. Just think about that for a minute, Rod and Philo and a night on the town. I’d say there wasn’t a bottle of plonk to be had for a square mile.
The set also contains replicas of the bands tour programmes bound into a hard-backed book, the very sought-after Phil Lynott Poetry books, 4 prints by legendary Lizzy cover artist Jim Fitzpatrick and a book containing quotes by all the members of the band about their experiences playing with Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy. It also has a selection of famous fans such as Slash, Lemmy, Joe Elliot, Geddy Lee, James Hetfield, Ian Gillan, Henry Rollins, Billy Corgan, Bobby Gillespie, Craig Finn, John McEnroe and Pat Cash talking about the band.
On top of all of this, the full trailer for the life of the band frontman has been released on what would have been his 71st birthday. The synopsis reads: “Phil Lynott: Songs For While I’m Away is a feature documentary on the life and music of Phil Lynott, telling the story of how a young black boy from working class 1950’s Dublin, became Ireland’s greatest rock star.”
The new Tom Petty box set after a long time waiting is finally getting a release, Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell tells usthat the group hopes to release a live set commemorating their 1997 residency at the Fillmore in San Francisco. They played 20 sold-out shows at the historic theatre in January and February of that year, radically changing the setlist each night. In 2009, seven songs from the Fillmore run were released on the Live Anthology compilation, but that was just a tiny sampling of their total collection.
“For me, that was almost the pinnacle of the band just being totally spontaneous night to night to night,” says Campbell. “We might throw in a Grateful Dead song that we just learned that afternoon. We recorded every show and we had guest artists from Bo Diddley to Roger McGuinn to John Lee Hooker. And I know, in my memory of those 20 nights, there’s an amazing album in there.”
Tom Petty estate finally release an expanded edition of his 1995 LP solo “Wildflowers”. Petty had said that he wanted to take the Heartbreakers and whoever else to reproduce every sound in a big way,” of that album. That album was really about sound in a big way. The plan was to go out there and perform the entire album as it was originally conceived with all of the songs.”
“Wildflowers” was initially envisioned as a double album, but was ultimately pared down to 15 songs on a single CD release. It became one of the most successful records of his career, with singles “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” “You Wreck Me” and “It’s Good To Be King” all getting extensive radio play. For years, Petty has been contemplating assembling the unreleased material into a deluxe package. The Super Deluxe Edition of the set features 70 tracks, spread out over five CDs, with nine songs that have never been released plus 34 alternate versions.
Curated by Tom’s daughters, Adria and Annakim Petty and his wife Dana Petty. A 2-CD set includes 25 songs, with ten previously unreleased cuts. A top of the line Super Deluxe Edition is a sprawling package available in a 5-CD or 9-LP 180g vinyl.
In addition to the original LP, the box contains a disc titled All the Rest that includes 10 outtakes from the sessions, five of which have never been heard. The third disc is comprised of 15 Petty home demos, with three of its 15 songs unreleased. The fourth CD consists of live versions of 14 songs recorded between 1995 and 2017, 12 available for the first time. The fifth disc, Finding Wallflowers, consists of 16 alternate studio versions.
“I think I put four of the [Wildflowers outtakes] on the She’s The One soundtrack just to fill out the album,” says Tom Petty. “But they were very hastily mixed. Take ‘Climb That Hill.’ There’s a version of that on She’s The One, but the Wildflowers one I think is extremely better. ‘Hung Up And Overdue’ is another one remixed and it turned into an epic. Carl Wilson [of the Beach Boys] and [Heartbreakers bassist] Howie Epstein singing quite a bit of harmony that didn’t come through on the original. Then again, there’s probably six songs that nobody has heard. There’s 11 or 12 [new] songs on the album. I think people are going to like it a lot. I like it a lot.”
The new version of Wildflowers will be released. “At one point the label really just wanted to put it out as a standalone album, And then there’s the point of view where they want to put both records together. There’s also the point of view that wants the box set with all the demos and all that.
The Wildflowers box set has been in the works for quite a long time, something that Petty frequently spoke of in his final years. The 1994 album was originally envisioned as a two-disc set, meaning many songs got cut for space when it was truncated. A sweet, tender melodic ballad opens Tom Petty’s acclaimed 1994 album Wildflowers. The title track’s initial chorus reveals a simple desire: freedom.
“You belong among the wildflowers / You belong in a boat out at sea / Sail away, kill off the hours / You belong somewhere you feel free.”
“I swear to god it’s all ad-lib from the word ‘go,’’ Petty told Paul Zollo in his 2005 book, Conversations with Tom Petty. “I turned on my tape deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a breath and played that from start to finish. And then sat back and went ‘Wow, what did I just do?’ And I listened to it. I didn’t change a word. Everything was just right there, off the top of my head. It’s a very sweet song. It’s got really good intentions.” Sonically, “Wildflowers” came from a different world than much of Petty’s work from the ’80s. There are no drums on the track at all, and the song features little more than a jangly acoustic guitar, piano, a spot or two of harmony and Petty’s pure vocals. Turning instead to a more stripped-down, raw and natural approach, he entered the studio with his bandmates from the Heartbreakers, unsure exactly of what the result would be. “Wildflowers” arrived like a breath of fresh air, or as Petty put it, a “stream of consciousness.”
“I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song,” the rocker confessed to Zollo. “So I’d come back for days playing that tape, thinking there must be something wrong here because this just came too easy. And then I realized that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
Producer Rick Rubin was also taken aback by the flow of material pouring out of Petty.
“One day, between cassette recordings of songs he was working on, he began strumming the guitar,” said Rubin . “After a couple of minutes of strumming chords, he played me an intricate new song complete with lyrics and story. I asked him what it was about. He said he didn’t know, it just came out. He had written it, or more like channelled it, in that very moment. He didn’t know what it was about or what the inspiration was. It arrived fully formed. It was breath-taking.”
Though Rubin couldn’t remember the exact song Petty played — it could very well have been “Wildflowers” — the producer was amazed by the the ease with which Petty put tunes together. Rubin, also enamoured with the songwriting from Full Moon Fever (1989), would go on to produce the entire Wildflowers record.
“When we first met, I was impressed with his dedication to writing,” the producer recalled. “He wrote constantly and called me to come and hear new songs often. There is a poetry about them that spoke to me.” But that poetry wasn’t immediately clear to Petty when he wrote “Wildflowers,” and the direction the song was taking him was unclear, though he knew his crumbling marriage was likely playing a part.
“I’ve read that Echo is my ‘divorce album’, but Wildflowers is the divorce album,” Petty told biographer Warren Zanes in the 2015 book, Petty: The Biography. “That’s me getting ready to leave. I don’t even know how conscious I was of it when I was writing it. I don’t go into this stuff with elaborate plans. But I’m positive that’s what Wildflowers is. It just took me getting up the guts to leave this huge empire that we had built, to walk out.” When the title track came tumbling out of his head, Petty didn’t recognize his subject straight away. His therapist asked him who the song was about.
“I told him I wasn’t sure,” the musician recalled to Zanes. “And then he said ‘I know. The song is about you. That’s you singing to yourself what you needed to hear.’” It appeared the freedom the subject was seeking was Petty’s to find. Whatever had been bottled up inside had come out onto the page and had become an unforgettable three minute song about love and liberation. “It kind of knocked me back,” Petty admitted. “But I realized he was right. It was me singing to me.”
Petty had seen the Rolling Stones play Sticky Fingers at the Fonda Theatrer in Los Angeles and noticed they played it completely out of sequence. “Single album concerts often don’t scan right for a concert,” he said. “But with the amount of material I had for the Wildflowers double album, I think I’ve got enough tempos and types of songs that I could do a live show … And it’ll be fun for the audience since there’s a bunch of songs they’ll know.
The album, which features hits like You Don’t Know How It Feels,” “You Wreck Me” and “It’s Good To Be King,” has been due an extensive re-release.
Now that he’s gone, his former collaborators are determined to see the projection to fruition. “I see that in the cards,” says producer Ryan Ulyate. “It’s going to be fantastic.” There’s also talk of deluxe editions of key albums from Petty’s catalogue. “If there’s a market for something like that,” says Campbell, “we’ll do it.”
Wildflowers & All The Rest—Super Deluxe Edition: A 5-CD and 9-LP 180g Direct to Consumer, Limited Edition set that features 70 tracks, nine unreleased songs and 34 unreleased versions. Includes Rick Rubin introduction, David Fricke essay, track-by-track for all music and lyrics to all the songs on Wildflowers and All The Rest. This set also comes with a hardbound book, cloth patch of Wildflowers logo, sticker of Wildflowers logo, replica of “Dogs with Wings” tour program (the 1995 Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers tour), hand-written 4-song lyric reprints in vellum envelope, a litho of new and exclusive art by Blaze Ben Brooks for the song “Only A Broken Heart,” and a (numbered) Certificate of Authenticity.
If you had to name just one band that this year has made you miss witnessing on the live stage, it would have to be Western Australia’s Psychedelic Porn Crumpets.
Hope everyone’s chirping as loud as the hundreds of migrating parrots who’ve become fond of the trees outside my window, from 6am to 6pm, sqwarking all sorts of jumbo. But, they sound happy, which makes me happy, and on the plus side I’ve been lucky enough to start every morning with rainbow lorikeet on toast, little bit of salt and pepper, avo, poached egg, delicious.
But back to music, actually before that… Do you think that some people get synesthesia and instead of seeing colours they have the ability to taste different foods? Or smell popcorn? Like I was thinking Radiohead would be a pack of wine gums in a freshly cut field whereas chemical brothers smells like a Tom Yum soup but tastes like that crackling soda pop lolly thing, remember the one you dip into the sherbet?
Anyway, childhood reminiscing aside. We’ve got a new single out called “Mr.Prism” which will hopefully be the answer to all your questions. *no parrots were harmed in the making of this email.
Arguably one of the most impressive bands you’ll see on a live stage anywhere, the group have been hard at work dishing out blistering tracks at every turn. Earlier this month, they emerged from lockdowns armed with ‘Mr. Prism’, their first new track since the release of ‘Mundungus’ last year. As singer, songwriter, and guitarist Jack McEwan explained at the time, the new tune was inspired by a rather rough experience while on the road.
“After our last tour of Europe I had a plethora of reasons to see a doctor,” McEwan explained. “First, he thought I had tonsillitis, so prescribed me penicillin, which didn’t help at all. I did Falls Festival over New Year’s and barely got through – turns out I had pneumonia. While it remains to be seen whether or not we’ll be receiving new music in the near future, the group are however set to hit the road again soon, performing a run of socially-distanced WA shows next month, before joining Ocean Alley on their Aussie tour next year.
Band Members:
Jack McEwan,
Luke Parish,
Danny Caddy,
Luke Reynolds,
Christopher Young
