Ryan Adams appeared on US music programme Austin City Limits to play an acoustic set featuring songs from throughout his solo career.
The 10-song set included Demolition‘s “Desire,” Ryan Adams’ “My Wrecking Ball” and Heartbreaker‘s “Oh My Sweet Carolina” alongside more up to date tracks like the 2014 single “Gimme Something Good“, from his self-titled 14th studio album.
Ryan Adams’ set list was:
Sweet Carolina
My Wrecking Ball
My Winding Wheel
Gimme Something Good
Lucky Now
Tired Of Giving Up
Please Do Not Let Me Go
Am I Safe
If I Am A Stranger
Let Go
Desire
Adam’s version of “I’m A Stranger” didn’t make it to the live broadcast and has been released online as a web-only clip. You can watch it below.
Black Sabbath have released rehearsal footage from their forthcoming tour.
The four-minute clip shows Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler rehearsing the 1970 song “Hand of Doom” with current drummer Tommy Clufetos. The clip also includes short interviews.
The End will be the band’s farewell tour. It begins on January 20 in Omaha, Nebraska.
The tour comes to Europe in June:
June 1 Budapest,Hungary Groupama Arena
June 8 Berlin, Germany Waldebuhne
June 11 Donington, UK Download
June 13 Verona, IT Arena Di Verona
June 15 Zurich, Switzerland Hallenstadon
June 17 Dessel,Belgium Grasspop
June 23 Halden, Norway Tons of Rock
June 25 Copenhagen, DE Copenhell
June 28 Vienna, Austria Stadthalle
June 30 Prague, Czech Rep. 02 Arena
July 2 Krakow, Poland Tauron Arena
July 5 Riga, Latvia Riga Arena
July 7 Helsinki, Finland Monsters of Rock
July 9 Stockholm, Sweden Monsters of Rock
July 12 Moscow, Russia Olympisky Arena
Bruce Springsteen paid tribute to David Bowie on the opening night of his The River tour.
Springsteen and The E Street Band covered “Rebel Rebel” in Pittsburgh. You can watch footage below.
Speaking from the stage, Springsteen noted that Bowie “supported our music back in the very beginning, ’73,” including covering “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City” and “Growing Up”. Bowie inviting Springsteen to Philadelphia while he was recording the Young Americans album.
Billboard reports that Springsteen and the band also worked on versions of “Suffragette City” and “Changes” during tour rehearsals in Pittsburgh.
January 19 – Chicago, IL @ United Center
January 24 & 27 – New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
January 29 – Washington, DC @ Verizon Center
January 31 – Newark, NJ @ Prudential Center
February 2 – Toronto, ON @ Air Canada Centre
February 4 – Boston, MA @ TD Garden
February 8 – Albany, NY @ Times Union Center
February 10 – Hartford, CT @ XL Center
February 12 – Philadelphia, PA @ Wells Fargo Center
February 16 – Sunrise, FL @ BB&T Center
February 18 – Atlanta, GA @ Philips Arena
February 21 – Louisville, KY @ KFC Yum! Center
February 23 – Cleveland, OH @ Quicken Loans Arena
February 25 – Buffalo, NY @ First Niagara Center
February 27 – Rochester, NY @ Blue Cross Arena
February 29 – St Paul, MN @ Xcel Energy Center
March 3 – Milwaukee, WI @ BMO Harris Bradley Center
March 6 – St Louis, MO @ Chaifetz Arena
March 10 – Phoenix, AZ @ Talking Stick Resort Arena
March 13 – Oakland, CA @ Oracle Arena
March 15 & 17 – Los Angeles, CA @ Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena
Meanwhile, Springsteen isn’t the only artist to cover “Rebel Rebel” in tribute to Bowie. Madonna performed the song on January 12 at Houston’s Toyota Centre.
Love‘s 1974 album, Reel To Real, is to be given the deluxe reissue treatment, with four previously unreleased tracks as part of the new set.
The songs, recorded during the original album sessions, are “Do It Yourself“, “I Gotta Remember“, “Somebody“, and “You Gotta Feel It“.
The Reel To Real reissue marks the first-ever CD/digital versions of the album and the first time it has been available on vinyl in over four decades.
It will be released on February 19 by High Moon Records.
The tracklisting for Reel To Real is:
Time Is Like A River
Stop The Music
Who Are You?
Good Old Fashion Dream
Which Witch Is Which
With A Little Energy
Singing Cowboy
Be Thankful For What You Got
You Said You Would
Busted Feet
Everybody’s Gotta Live
Do It Yourself [Outtake]
I Gotta Remember [Outtake]
Somebody [Outtake]
You Gotta Feel It [Outtake]
With A Little Energy [Alternate Mix]
Busted Feet [Alternate Mix]
You Said You Would [Single Mix]
Stop The Music [Alternate Take]
Graveyard Hop [Studio Rehearsal]
Singing Cowboy [Alternate Take]
Everybody’s Gotta Live [Electric Version]
Wonder People (I Do Wonder) [Studio Rehearsal] All Bonus Tracks Previously Unreleased Except 18
John Cale answers your questions in the current Uncut, dated February 2016 and out now.
The solo artist and former Velvet Underground member discusses his work with Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Nico and the Happy Mondays, and recalls jamming with David Bowie in the 1980s.
Asked how he feels today about The Velvet Underground’s early ’90s reunion, though, Cale is scathing. “We wasted a lot of great opportunities,” he explains. “The potential was there to do a lot of great things, but Lou just wanted to regurgitate his catalogue.
“We could have done a lot of different things, and everybody was there, waiting for it to happen… But that’s it. I mean, everybody got to understand what Moe [Tucker] and Sterling [Morrison] were about, so that’s a positive thing.”
Cale also recalled the personal issues during the band’s original existence, saying: “When it came to [1968’s] White Light/White Heat we were barely able to be in the same room for more than five minutes. White Light was recorded quickly – it had to be.”
Pop history is not littered with classic triple albums. All Things Must Pass and Sandinista! are solid doubles with bonus tracks already appended. Yessongs and The Last Waltz are compendious souvenirs of epic live performances. More recently, Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me, at a mere 18 songs, sprawls rather languidly across three discs.
Which makes 69 Love Songs, Stephin Merritt’s magnum opus, now satisfyingly reissued on vinyl, a singular achievement. Approaching three hours of music, it amounts to a perverse, secret history of popular song, as viewed from late-20th-century lower East Side Manhattan, and was seen by many, on its release in September 1999 as a fantastical fin-de-siecle folly. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, in a moment of acuity, dispatched an earlier Magnetic Fields album with the apercu “more songs about songs and songs” – an assessment Merritt himself appreciated. “69 Love Songs is not remotely an album about love,” he said. “It’s an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love.”
So how has this brazenly self-conscious, self-promotional display of cleverdickery, endured over the last decade and a half? I admit to having little perspective on this: in our household, 69 Love Songs is as ubiquitous as ABBA Gold. If you were to run the metrics on my personal listening over the last 15 years, aggregate the car journey soundtracks, the iPod hours, the late-night singalongs and Sunday morning Spotify sessions, I’d wager that these songs would top my own 21st-century pop charts.
And that’s because they’re not (just) emotionally arid exercises in metapop. The American fabulist Donald Barthelme, whose 60 Stories anthology is a funny West Village uncle of 69 Love Songs, was similarly accused of writing bloodless metafiction. Elaborating on his aesthetic credo in 1987, he inadvertently invented Stephin Merritt: “Let us suppose that I am the toughest banjulele player in town and that I have been contracted to play ‘Melancholy Baby’ for six hours… There is one thing of which you may be sure: I am not going to play ‘Melancholy Baby’ as written. Rather I will play something that is parallel, in some sense, to ‘Melancholy Baby’, based upon the chords of ‘Melancholy Baby’, made out of ‘Melancholy Baby’, having to do with ‘Melancholy Baby’ – commentary, exegesis, elaboration, contradiction.”
Merritt’s gambit is that this exegesis and elaboration can be every bit as entertaining, amusing and even affecting as the most heartfelt performance of “authenticity”. “The book of love is long and boring…” Merritt croons on what’s become the album’s break-out pop hit and one of the many self-referential mini-manifestos. In practice, and after all these years, 69 Love Songs, is anything but.
It’s cliché to say that cynicism, irony and self-conscious sophistry are the barbed wire and booby traps protecting a sentimental heart. But you don’t have to dig too deep into 69 Love Songs to find staggering works of genius heartbreak. Two songs in, “I Don’t Believe In The Sun” could be an Elton John song – if Elton ever fancied adapting Robert Burton’s Anatomy Of Melancholy into a jukebox musical. It’s followed by “All My Little Words”, one of the ripest numbers on the collection, a kind of cut-glass Appalachian folksong, sung by LD Beghtol as though he were Oscar Wilde on his 1882 lecture tour of the US Midwest. It’s also, Merritt says in the sleevenote interview with Daniel Handler, one of the “true” songs – that is, it describes a moment in a “real” relationship, with someone who describes themselves as “unboyfriendable”. By overloading the song with ornate metaphor (“You are a splendid butterfly”), by giving it to Beghtol to sing, there’s a fascination with a kind of musical alienation technique, seeing how far he can push the song and have it still remain… touching. As Roland Barthes wrote in A Lover’s Discourse (a kissing continental cousin of 69 Love Songs), “To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).”
69 Love Songs is an austere cabaret, closer to Brecht than Rufus Wainwright, but for some people, the excess and hysteria, the “Busby Berkeley Dreams” of it all, is clearly too much. In one of the great modern instances of missing the point, novelist Rick Moody determined in 2003 to winnow out all the “show tunes” and cut the collection down to 31 Love Songs, to demonstrate that somewhere inside the profusion of the three discs there was a pretty tight new wave rock album trying to get out. This is rather like insisting the construction of the Eiffel Tower is a tad too ostentatious, and would have been better off aspiring to a nice modest 300 feet.
It also fails to recognise that 69 Love Songs, is, among other things, an acute piece of anti-rockist music criticism. Merritt has always maintained that the genre he is happiest working in is “variety” – that is, the full sweep of pop, from jug band blues (“Xylophone Track”) to cheerleader songs (“Washington DC”), from wartime waltzes (“The Night You Can’t Remember”) to magical realist Highland murder ballads (“”Wi’ Nae Wee Bairn Ye’ll Me Beget”). Which isn’t to say that (a certain kind of soft) rock is beyond him: “No One Will Ever Love You” is an immaculate distillation of imperial-era Fleetwood Mac into three minutes. Just that it’s no longer the centre of the musical universe – rather simply another satellite of love in Merritt’s rich conceptual orrery.
Before 69 Love Songs, Merritt was known, if at all, as a composer of depressive, fabergé-egg synth pop – immaculately constructed, perfectly useless music-box contraptions designed to break your heart. What’s more, he was signed to Merge, then the earnest torch-bearer of US indie rock. 69 Love Songs was the supremely audacious act whereby he willed a preferrable context into being – imagined himself as a peer of Sondheim rather than Superchunk.
It was, of course, a trick that could only be pulled off precisely once, and subsequent albums have emerged a little apologetically, each trailing a twinkling pretty standard or two, while Merritt continues to try to make good on his ambition of producing 100 Hollywood musicals. It may be that Merritt’s genius is ultimately too eccentric, too perverse, too bleak to conquer modern Hollywood (though if “Hallelujah” can wind up in Shrek, clearly anything can happen). It may be that Merritt took a devastating creative advance on future achievements, and is now spent. Never mind: 69 Love Songs remains a matchless achievement: a career-spanning ‘greatest hits’ box that, spendthrift of genius, he somehow contrived to compose in one go.
Q&A
Stephin Merritt 69 Love Songs originally occurred to you as a conceit – originally to write 100 love songs. Do you such concepts occur to you often? How many make it out of the notebook?
Sure do. Possible albums, musicals, books and movies occur to me several times in a typical night, along with one-offs in other media, the vast majority never get beyond my little notebook. For example, I imagine writing a superhero comic with punningly named characters drawn from idiomatic clichés: the observant jew, the vanishing middle class, white flight, the gay mafia, the yellow peril, the ugly american, etc, with the appropriate superpowers. If I thought I was going to get around to doing this, I of course wouldn’t tell you about it.
What are your abiding memories of recording the album?
Mostly I remember my miniscule wall space all covered in construction paper, in lieu of a project board.
Was the audacity of the conceit a way of artificially recreating the workload of an average Brill Building composer circa 1962? Is such an environment – hard work, focus, coffee, cigarettes – close to happiness for you?
Yes… Except for the focus, coffee and cigarettes. My hard work involves daydreaming, alcohol, and actual oxygen.
You mention somewhere that around 50 songs were discarded – have any of them surfaced elsewhere?
I think 31 songs were discarded, for various reasons. “The Sun and the Sea and the Sky,” rejected for not being about romantic love, ended up on ‘Obscurities’ [Merritt’s 2011 compilation of B-sides, etc].
Did you realise at the time that this was the record that would make your name, beyond the indie scene? Was global acclaim something you had dreamt of?
Everyone famous quickly discovers that fame and fortune are independent vectors.
Are you surprised at how your songs have subsequently entered people’s lives? Do you ever think people may have missed the point of a song?
There is always the possibility that it is I who miss the point of a song. Playing “The Book Of Love” at a wedding sounds like a terrible idea to me, but it seems to be becoming a wedding standard. Whatevs.
How did you find listening to 69 Love Songs again for the remastering?
Every time we tour I listen to all the records to choose material. I need to listen seldom enough that I can hear new things and be surprised.
How do you feel about the vinyl revival in general – I imagine you as more of a CD person?
Actually, I really miss cassettes.
How important is the sequencing of the album? Is someone missing out if they listen to the album on random on Spotify? (I remember Lou Reed telling people to listen to his New York LP all the way through in the right order in one sitting – do you sympathise?)
He must have been in a mood. Almost any album since 1966 should be listened to that way.
Do you have any sense of 69 Love Songs as an album that was influential on other artists?
Los Campos Magnéticos [the Argentinian trio who perform cabaret versions of Merritt’s songs in the bars of Buenos Aires] are probably the best band in the world, but I don’t know for sure cause I haven’t heard them all.
Are you still living in LA?
No, I moved three years ago. I still have a studio apartment in New York, but my house full of instruments is upstate. I desperately miss the silent movie theatre, so don’t be surprised if I move back.
Have you found anywhere as conducive to writing as the gay bars of New York?
I find many gay bars in the UK and the Netherlands very comfortable too.
69 Love Songs feels to me like the last, perfect document of lower East Side/East Village New York culture. Would you agree?
‘Perfect’ is exactly wrong, but I’m afraid you may be right about ‘last’. Now there are joggers in the streets.
Do you think 69 Love Songs would work as a jukebox musical (a la We Will Rock You/Mamma Mia/etc?)
I do think the idea is translatable into other media; that is not one of them.
What was the last great song you heard?
I have only recently discovered Ketty Lester. She has great material, and what comes to mind is a delightful song called “Lonely People (Do foolish Things).”
What was the last great song you wrote?
“Why I Am Not A Teenager.” It’s not out yet.
INTERVIEW: STEPHEN TROUSSÉ
“How about flying a little more…?” After DAVID BOWIE’s extraordinary career resurrection with The Next Day, he is preparing to release ★ – an album of “big concepts”. Here, the album’s bandleader DONNY McCASLIN, reveals all about Bowie’s remarkable working-practices, including jazz solos, conceptual feedback and sushi lunches. “He leaves no stone unturned,” we learn.
I first met David through Maria Schneider. I’ve been in her group for about ten years or so. She and David were talking about collaborating. Then she was calling me up, looking for recommendations about different aspects of what they were doing. We did two small group workshops for “Sue [Or In A Season Of Crime)”, with David, Ryan Keberle – a trombone player from Maria’s band – myself and the rhythm section. I recommended the drummer from my band, Mark Guiliana, to play on it. After the first workshop, David came with Maria and Tony Visconti to hear my band play at the 55 Bar, a local spot in New York. The next morning he emailed me and said that he had written a song based on what he’d heard last night and wondered if I interested in recording it. After I picked my jaw up off the floor – he was so polite about it, just so generous in what he said – I said, “Absolutely, love to.” So he sent me a demo version he’d made at home. He had programmed the drum, the bass, he had played the saxophone solo on it. That was “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore”. Then pretty quickly it was, “How about we do two or three tunes?” Then I think Maria suggested to him, “Why don’t you have Donny’s band do a whole record with you?” That was how it started.
The first time we got together to record, we planned four or five days of rehearsal, then a week of recording. But things got busier on his end. The timetable got pushed back. Then it was just, “Let’s record for six days.” That was January this year. At that point, I thought it was going to be a few songs. David said, “I have no idea how this is going to go, let’s just go for it and see what happens.” He’d sent me, say, six or seven songs. He had written out some parts, I transcribed and orchestrated some things that were on the demos, I added other parts to what he had written.
We’d arrive at the studio around 10 or 10.30, tune up and listen to what we’d done the day before. David would arrive at 11 and we would usually work until about 4pm. The Magic Shop, the studio where we recorded, is in the SoHo neighbourhood in New York. It has a very unassuming front door. You walk in, there’s a desk on the right, a very narrow hallway and at the end a set of big doors leads into the control room where they have this vintage [Neve] console. Then you go into the studio itself. It’s not a huge room. We had Mark’s drums set up at the far end of the room. Then next to Mark was Jason Linder and his keyboards. On bass, Tim Lefebvre was closest to the control room, with his back to it, facing Mark who’s at the other end of the room with Jason on his left. Then David was to Tim’s right where he had some guitars set up and a vocal mic. I was set up in a booth next to David. We were working as a live band and David was recording with us. It was all very intimate. That was good, because you can hear that it’s recorded in a live room. It makes it feel real.
We recorded two songs a day and maybe only one on the last day. I remember Tony and David both saying, “Wow, this is going so fast. You’re doing a great job.” David took everything we did during the day home at night and listened intently to it, trying to figure out what he wanted and so on and so forth. His attention to detail that way was eye-opening. By the end of the week, as we had got more momentum going, David said, “OK, I want to go back and record this one and this one again.” We celebrated his birthday in the middle of the sessions. Because it was New York City, we had sushi. Really fancy sushi.
(Photo by Jimmy King)
On a typical day, David would come in and we’d listen to what we’d done the day before. He might say, “Let’s try this or let’s try that.” Or “Let’s try this song.” We’d rehearse a little, then just roll tape. Usually within the first two or three takes, we’d go back and listen and he’d say, “OK, we’d got it.” Then maybe he would go in and refine the vocal, and maybe Tim or Mark might fix something. Then I would go in and do the rest of the woodwind in addition to the basic track. David would say, “How do you guys feel?” He was very democratic, always soliciting our opinions. He’s taking in the whole thing. Maybe I’d play a solo and say, “What do you think, David. How is that feeling?” He was usually super-positive. The way he would give feedback was cool. Again, it was kind of conceptual. It wasn’t “Well, on bar 4 instead of playing B flat play B natural.” It wasn’t that kind of thing. I guess the week went pretty well, because at the end of it David said, “Let’s do this again.”David presented almost every song as a demo. Most of them he had recorded by himself at home, but I think he had recorded some with Tony and a drummer sometime before. There were a couple he taught us in the studio, but I don’t think those made the record. We probably recorded 15 or 16 songs in total. Some I had in advance of the recording session, but then on the second go around, when we reconvened in February, he hit me with five or six songs a few days beforehand. It seemed like they came to him pretty quickly. I think “Blackstar” was one he had demo’d the night before we went to the studio or something.
It was a pretty open and collaborative process. Generally, the song you hear is what he brought in. There may have been a tiny bit of improvisation, but for the most part, the length of the song, the verse, the chorus format, all that was pretty clear from the demos. That said, he wasn’t dictating to us. He’d never say, “You have to play this drum groove,” or, “The bassline has to be exactly like this.” He was open to our interpretations of the demos – a lot of the horn lines, the orchestrations I did, the way I added different instruments. If I wasn’t sure, I’d say, “I’m just going to try this and we’ll see [if it works].” Then I’d ask David, “What do you think?” He was totally affirmative and into it. When the sax is soloing, that’s me improvising; that’s all happening in the moment. But to be clear, David would say, “This will be a spot for a solo.” It felt like he was really trusting our instincts, or my instincts. It felt really cool that way. It was the jazz idea of a collaborative democracy, where we’re passing the ball back and forth, but yet it was in this context of what he had written and the forms he’d come up with.
David is super focused in the studio. He’d come into the live room and we’d get ready to track, he would sing a little bit – and I mean a little bit. We would do a warm-up rehearsal to get it going, but when it was time to go, he was ready to go. When he was fixing up his vocal part, it would go quickly. He would add harmonies, or double track. Often, he knew what he wanted to do, or maybe it was a conversation between him and Tony – but it happened fast. They have all this history together, they understand each other. They had a very good rapport. Let’s say we recorded a track, we’d do one or two takes, we’re listening to it, and when David would say, “OK, that’s the one, let’s go with it.” Then maybe David would go in and work on the vocal. So Tony really knew exactly what to give him and how to get it to him. He was working with Kevin Killen, the engineer, who’s great, but Tony I felt was really quick to identify what section David wanted to work on, how to give him what he needed in the headphone mix. All the little details. Tony would say, “Start here. Give David more kick drum” – or whatever it is.
With David, Tony was really on top of it. This whole process, from start to finish was not that long. We’re not talking about three hours of vocals here. David knows what he wants to do and then Tony is great at facilitating that on the technical side. The whole process goes pretty quick because David delivers. But David was never consumed with his own part. He would also listen to what we’re doing – our overdubs or whatever – so he’s able to take in the whole picture.We never did a lot of takes. Between one and three, and that was it. When we got together for that first week, David said he wanted to re-record “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore”. We were playing hard, going for it. That just happened in, like, ten minutes. That might have been the first take. The new version of “Sue” took the longest. Because the original we recorded with Maria is so specific, with all the orchestration, I said to David, “Why don’t we do a version that’s more open, where we’re just jamming, the guys are jamming, and there’s David Bowie singing that first part. Then we’ll all just cue the sections.” So we did one or two passes at that which were really wild, but it didn’t work. I went back to Maria’s score and reduced it to clarinet, alto flute, tenor. I came back the next morning and said, “Tony, I’ve got an idea of ‘Sue’.” Then I put those parts on and everybody felt it was feeling complete. I was trying to push to have those guys play more open and to get it edgier and let loose.
I remember the demo he sent me for “Girl Loves Me”. It was one he’d done entirely on his own. He had string parts in the version that I scored out for flutes. There’s a really lyrical melody in the middle of the song, an interlude, that was also strings. I played an alto flute and a C flute. Then James Murphy became involved. James took it to his studio and did this whole other thing with it. Mark and Jason both heard snippets of it when they were over there working. Mark was saying it was really different from how he recorded it. I don’t know if that’s the version that ended up on the record or if that’s going to be a remix or something.
On the last run, in March, Ben Monder came in on guitar. He was set up between David and Tim. I remember he sounded great on “I Can’t Give Everything Away”. There was a sax solo, a guitar solo; there may have been a keyboard solo, too. But I love this one. I think the horn stuff that I did on this one had chords that were there on the demo. I may have added a voice or two, but in terms of the part that I played, David had it all there.
I was so inspired by how much music and literature David’s checked out; he is constantly looking for new things, to listen to and to read. The concept with my band, it’s this idea of electronica music mixed with improvisation. I think David was particularly drawn to that. For instance, when describing one of the first songs we recorded, “Somewhere”, David referenced the Boards Of Canada song “Alpha And Omega” [which McCaslin recorded for Casting For Gravity] as an approach. It’s just amazing how he processes information. We’d talk about Death Grips, this band in California. We talked a lot about sax players, but he didn’t bring his horn. That would have been fantastic. But his horn is all over the demo for “‘Tis A Pity… ” and one called “The Hunger” [“Lazarus” on the album].
Did David ever indicate whether there was a connection between Blackstar and Lazarus? No, but it’s funny, at one point he mentioned the guy who’s the musical director on Lazarus – a good friend of mine, who subs in my band for Jason. He said, “Oh, you know Henry Hay? He’s working on another project for me.” I didn’t know what it was, he didn’t go into it. Then we recorded a song that I’m sure didn’t make the record called “Wistful”. David sent me a demo with a singer and a piano player playing this arpeggiated thing. Beautiful. We recorded it in January, but David wasn’t feeling it. He sent me a different version for the March session. It was the piano player and a singer, and the singer had a kind of musical theatre approach for it. I thought, “Wow, that kind of sounds like it could be for a musical.” And lo and behold it was! The piano player on that demo was Henry Hay.
In April, I did a day of overdubs at Tony’s place [Human Worldwide], some flute on “Blackstar” and another saxophone part for “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore”. David and Tony spent a lot of time there, after we did that first round, listening to the stuff over and over and sifting through the material to make it what it is. I know David did some more vocal stuff. One way to think of it, when we were together David and Tony were gathering information, laying it down, then the two of them comb through everything. For instance, we recorded “Blackstar” in two different pieces at Magic Shop. It might have even been on two different days. At the time, David and Tony were talking about how they were going to bridge the gap between the parts, and I think they put it together at Tony’s. When I went in April, it sounded different for sure. They had added strings and the drum part. When I heard the little snippet that’s being used on the TV show [The Last Panthers], I was like, “Yeah, that’s definitely different from what we did.”
We didn’t have a wrap party but I think a big part of that is that Lazarus has been a pretty consuming project for him. We’ve been in contact over the summer and various times he’s said, “I want to organize a listening party, I’ve got so much going on lately.” David’s been super busy with Lazarus. I understand. But hopefully that will happen soon.
What did I learn from working with David Bowie? He leaves no stone unturned. He listens intently to everyone and is totally present in every moment. David could be very conceptual. When he was giving us feedback, for instance, it was never as black and white as, “I want this to sound like Motown, 1967.” He’d say things that would engage your imagination. You could think about it and figure out what it means to you. I remember him saying once, “That sounds great. How about flying a little more?”
Looking back, I was inspired by David’s songs, by how imaginative he was with the lyrics, and how even the demos had all the elements in place; strong melody, harmony, bass line and drum groove. Seeing how he lives, he’s gracious and generous and doesn’t spend time doing things he doesn’t want to do. He would go over everything we recorded, until he got the music where it felt right. It reaches so far. He is such a deep artist. You know how it is.
Neil Young has announced plans for a one-off screening of two of his films and a Q&A session to be broadcast live to cinemas across America.
Called An Evening With Neil Young, Pitchfork reports that the event will takes place on Monday, February 29 and features consecutive screenings of the 1982 film Human Highway and Rust Never Sleeps, the concert film about Young’s 1978 tour.
Following the film screenings, Young will participate in a Q&A session with filmmaker Cameron Crowe.
The event is expected to last three and a half hours in total.
You can find more details about tickets and the cinemas screening the event by clicking here.
At this point, it has not been confirmed whether the event will be broadcast outside the United States.
In August 2014, Young released a new Director’s Cut of Human Highway, which played at the Toronto Film Festival.
Suede have released a new video, “Pale Snow“, taken from their forthcoming new album, Night Thoughts.
The track is available now as a free download with pre-orders of the album, which is released on January 22.
Meanwhile, the band will be appearing at a special series of in-store shows in January including one at HMV on Oxford Street on the day of the album release. See below for full list of in-stores.
January 21st: Banquet Signing + Hippodrome Gig, Kingston (full band)
Tickets: http://smarturl.it/SuedeBanquet
22nd: HMV Oxford Street Instore, London (acoustic)
23rd: HMV Instore, Manchester (acoustic)
23rd: Film screening of “Night Thoughts” followed by Q&A with Brett Anderson and Matt Osman of Suede presented by Clint Boon – Film Screening starts at 9pm
Tickets: http://smarturl.it/SuedeHome
25th: Sister Ray Signing + Ace Hotel Gig, London (acoustic)
Tickets: http://smarturl.it/SuedeSisterRay
Tony Visconti has revealed David Bowie was planning to record and release another album after Blackstar.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Visconti says that in the final weeks of his life Bowie had begin demoing five new songs and that the pair were in discussions about starting a new record.
“At that late stage, he was planning the follow-up to Blackstar, and I was thrilled,” Visconti told Rolling Stone. “And I thought, and he thought, that he’d have a few months, at least. Obviously, if he’s excited about doing his next album, he must’ve thought he had a few more months. So the end must’ve been very rapid. I’m not privy to it. I don’t know exactly, but he must’ve taken ill very quickly after that phone call.”
Speaking to Uncut, Blackstar’s bandleader Donny McCaslin had previously confirmed that during sessions for the album, Bowie and the band “probably recorded 15 or 16 songs.” Among the songs that didn’t appear on Blackstar, McCaslin identified “Somewhere” and “Wistful” – the latter he described as “a ballad with a singer and just a piano player playing this arpeggiated thing.”
Violent Femmes have announced details of their first studio album for 15 years.
We Can Do Anything will be released on March 4 through [PIAS].
The band reconvened for last year’s Happy New Year EP, but We Can Do Anything is the band’s first full-length album since 2000’s Freak Magnet.
“We’ve always done what we wanted and how we wanted,” says the band’s Gordon Gano “Fundamentally there’s no difference from then until now. It’s a natural continuation.”
The tracklisting for We Can Do Anything is:
Memory
I Could Be Anything
Issues
Holy Ghost
What You Really Mean
Foothills
Travelling Solves Everything
Big Car
Untrue Love
I’m Not Done
Ahead of Electric Light Orchestra‘s upcoming UK arena tour, Jeff Lynne will be answering your questions in our regular An Audience With… feature.
So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask the artist otherwise known as Otis Wilbury?
How did he celebrate after ELO played their first show in 28 years last year at Hyde Park?
Who’s his favourite fifth Beatle?
What are his lasting memories of being a Traveling Wilburys?
Send up your questions by noon, Friday, January 22 to uncutaudiencewith@timeinc.com.
The best questions, and Jeff’s answers, will be published in a future edition of Uncut magazine.
In French photographer Estelle Hanania’s shots for the sleeve of Kannon, the members of Sunn O))) can be seen in the band’s signature hooded robes lurking about a magnificently gloomy Oslo mausoleum. Apparently, they have a thing about loitering in these kinds of spaces – in the artwork for 2009’s Monoliths & Dimensions, it was an Aztec pyramid.
As they so often do, these strange figures look as if they’re preparing for a mysterious rite. Perhaps it has something to do with the cryptic black object on the album’s cover. Though designed by Swiss artist Angela LaFont Bollinger as a visual representation of the Buddhist goddess of mercy for which Kannon is named, it more strongly resembles a charred icon from a long-defunct religion now being readied for worship by a new circle of eager adherents. In other words, you don’t have to be Peter Cushing to know that unspeakable things are about to happen even if – as was the case with the banks of fog that filled Royal Festival Hall during Sunn O)))’s appearance during David Byrne’s Meltdown last summer – you’ll strain your eyes trying to see what the hell they are.
The music on Kannon has no shortage of sinister elements, either. Even more inhuman than the groans and shrieks of amplifiers are the noises that emerge from Attila Csihar, the Hungarian vocalist who has been a frequent collaborator with the core Sunn O))) partnership of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson when he’s not busy fronting Norwegian black-metallers Mayhem. Rarely have Csihar’s guttural rumblings been so terrifying as they are when they make their first appearance a few minutes into the first of Kannon’s three parts. Compared to him, Smaug the dragon sounds as menacing as Taylor Swift.
Of course, all this ought to be entirely ridiculous. And at various junctures in Sunn O)))’s 17-year history, it has been. But O’Malley and Anderson have always been quick to concede the absurdity of their highly stylised vision of metal at its blackest and sludgiest, perhaps because they’re also confident about their music’s ability to overwhelm everything in its path like a river of toxic ooze. With its combination of high-concept ideas and low-end, bowel-quivering ballast, the formula has proven to be irresistible to eggheads and headbangers alike.
Now, thanks to the instantly legendary Meltdown performance and the band’s bruising collaboration with Scott Walker on last year’s Soused, Sunn O))) may be breaking through to listeners beyond the metal and experimental-music camps that have made equal claims on the band since it first emerged in Seattle in 1998. While Sunn O)))’s own cult of adherents is well schooled in the band’s studiously curated selection of reference points (the gnarly drones of Dylan Carlson and Earth, the sustained tone compositions of LaMonte Young, the none-more-black extremes of Darkthrone and Bathory) and keenly familiar with its collaborators (Merzbow, Boris and Ulver all having preceded Scott), these newcomers are enthralled first and foremost by the spectacle and scale of it all. Even though any work of ambient doom metal played by scary dudes in robes will remain a bridge too far for many, Kannon will leave other neophytes feeling awed by the complexity and physicality achieved here and rightfully so.
The album’s 34-minute length adds to the air of accessibility, at least by Sunn O))) standards. It’s also a more dramatic demonstration of the band’s core ethos than might have been possible on the recent collaborations with Scott Walker and Ulver, as well as the far more guest-heavy Monoliths & Dimensions. Not since 2004’s White 2 has the band been so pared down or sounded so focused on the mission of achieving maximum density.
The music here first began to take shape during the sessions for Monoliths in 2007 and continued to develop via live performances. Though longtime collaborators such as Csihar, Oren Ambarchi, Rex Ritter and Steve Moore all contributed to Kannon’s triptych, the interplay between O’Malley’s guitar and Anderson’s bass often provides the music’s richest moments. The surprising sensitivity that the players exhibit towards each other defies the assumption that Sunn O))) entirely owes its impact to slow-motion riffage or cascades of feedback. In fact, the guitar heroics of “Kannon II” would seem downright Hendrixian if they weren’t accompanied by what sounds like a swarm of angry bees, with Csihar somewhere in the middle of them trying to conduct a black mass.
Speaking of masses, Sunn O)))’s longstanding penchant for pomp and ritual has never before yielded music that seems so religious. That association is no doubt fostered by the liturgical nature of Csihar’s singing (rather than his growling) and the Buddhist reference in the album’s title, Kannon being the figure who listens to the sounds of suffering throughout the world. While doubters may scoff at the possibility there’s a devotional dimension to Sunn O)))’s sonic monoliths, Kannon could very well elicit a meditative response from anyone who can hear it as something more than a hellish miasma of noise. Indeed, if not for the Hammer Horror signifiers of evil that pervade the band’s visual presentation, Kannon could soundtrack a yoga class, albeit one taking place in the sixth circle of hell.
Q&A
Stephen O’Malley
How do you think Kannon compares with your previous albums?
I was playing the mix to Oren Arambachi, who plays on the record. He reacted by saying, “You know what? I think this is pretty accessible for Sunn O))) — it’s kind of like Sunn O)))’s pop album.” And he wasn’t making a joke. He was making a metaphor, obviously – it’s not pop. But for Sunn O))), there’s something about it that you can grasp a little bit more. It’s not because of the length or the speed – there’s more on the surface here. This record is close to how the band really sounds live in the last couple of years.
Do you think that the music on Kannon is still steeped in the band’s more-is-more aesthetic?
It’s not like it’s all really coloured by a lot of effects or crazy edits or stuff like that – it’s more the sound of our amps. Of course, there are overdubs and Attila may have three vocal mics going at once, or maybe there’s a sub synth that Oren did that sounds like an avalanche happening, but it’s not excessive – they’re all parts of the arrangement. What’s excessive is the fact we’ve arrived at a place where each guy needs four full amplifier stacks on stage, or that we have a sponsorship with the fog machine company, or that we have to air-freight 50-year-old amplifiers to Tasmania to play one show – that’s excessive. But hey – who gets to do this shit?
INTERVIEW: JASON ANDERSON
“Exeunt, pursued by bear” is one of Shakespeare’s most famous stage directions, taken to its limit in Alejandro Iñárritu’s new film. Here, Hugh Glass – a real-life 19th century trapper and frontiersman – is mauled by a grizzly bear near the banks of the Missouri river. It’s a gruelling, 5-minute scene – a brilliantly executed piece of digital trickery that thrusts the viewer right into the blood, sweat and claws. Iñárritu follows Glass as he miraculously makes his way back the 200 miles to Fort Kiowa, seeking revenge against the men who left him to die in the wilderness.
What follows is essentially IMAX adventure porn with beards and muskets; Bear Grills meets Cormac McCarthy in an inhospitable landscape one character rightly describes as “the edge of the world”. As Glass makes his way unsteadily through barren countryside – beset by Indians, French soldiers and ghosts – you might think of the eerie, hallucinatory tone of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man or perhaps one of Werner Herzog’s forays into the outer limits of endurance like Aguirre: The Wrath Of God. There are minor echoes, too, of other survival tales Touching The Void and 127 Hours.
As Glass, Leonardo di Caprio is buried under a mound of facial hair and furs – he looks like a hipster gone to seed; his stoic determination is impressive. You will watch a man cauterize a throat wound with gunpowder! Pitted against Glass is Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald – one of two men tasked with looking after the wounded trapper and who abandons Glass to the elements. Fitgerald’s windy speeches about “the sublimity of mercy” are typical Iñárritu guff (as is the Native American mysticism), yet the bulky Hardy seems more naturally at home among the snowy mountains and fast-moving rivers than Di Caprio: his maniacal, semi-scalped Fitzgerald a good fit in this bleak, godless terrain. The soundtrack by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto and Bryce Dessner, meanwhile, features unsettling, electronic drones and pulsing orchestral flourishes.
Iñárritu’s plan seems to make the viewer experience as much as possible Glass’ tribulations, in all their macabre glory. The opening battle sequence, where the US military expedition for whom Glass is a guide are attacked by Ree Indians, is a gruesome 10-minute sequence, seemingly shot in one take. As Glass’ journey progresses, Iñárritu heightens colours, closes in on tiny details and frames magnificent wild vistas. It’s thrilling; if exhausting.
Patch The Sky is due out on March 25. According to Pitchfork, Mould is joined on the album by bassist Jason Narducy (Split Single, Verbow) and drummer Jon Wurster (Superchunk, Mountain Goats).
Recently, Mould discussed the possibility of a Hüsker Dü reunion, after the band launched a new website. He confirmed that the group was “reviving the logo and the brand” but when asked whether the band were likely to launch a comeback by Stereogum, he confirmed, “Nah, no reunion.”
“You know … Grant [Hart] and I have talked. We’re fine,” Mould told Stereogum. “Will we work together? No. I like to run my own ship and I think he likes to run his own ship, and that’s great… I got my life over here, man. I never want to take advantage of the fact that I was in that band. Nor do I ever want to get in the way of its legacy.”
Mould has written a lengthy essay about Patch The Sky on the Merge Records website:
“Here’s the deal. In 2012, people loved Silver Age (to a degree that surprised me, pleasantly), likewise Beauty & Ruin in 2014 (despite the heaviness of the subject matter, which I thought might be a bit alienating… apparently not. Another pleasant surprise.).
“But Patch The Sky is the darkest one.
“After the Letterman performance in February 2015 where ‘dust fell from the rafters’, it would have seemed logical to go the punk rock route—an entire album of two-minute songs—but that wasn’t where my soul was at.
“I withdrew from everyday life. I wrote alone for six months. I love people, but I needed my solitude. The search for my own truth kept me alive. These songs are my salvation.
“I’ve had a solid stretch of hard emotional times, and thanks for the condolences in advance. I don’t want to go into the details—more death, relationships ending, life getting shorter—because they’re already in the songs. Just listen and see if you can fit yourself into my stories. The words make you remember. The music makes you forget.
“But Patch The Sky is also the catchiest one.
“I always aim for the perfect balance of bright melodies and dark stories. I’ve used this juxtaposition for years. This time, I’ve tuned it to high contrast.
“The first side of the album is generally simple and catchy. The second side is heavier in spirit and tone. Opposing forces and properties. I love both sides of Patch The Sky.
“At the core of these songs is what I call the chemical chorus—you hear it once and your brain starts tingling. The heart rate picks up. It gets worse—you know it’s coming again and you can barely stand the anticipation. Then, the beautifully heartbreaking bridge appears, and you’re all set up—hooked for life. Music is an incredibly powerful drug. I want to be your drug dealer. I have what you need.”
For a while in the mid-1990s, the West Midlands were home to a music festival called Phoenix; a slightly half-cocked Glastonbury surrogate that, far from taking place in idyllic Avalon, was established on a disused airfield-cum-landfill site blessed with little in the way of either shelter or shade. Bob Dylan, possibly disoriented, would fill in a gap in the schedule between Suede and Tricky. Crazy Horse would face off against The Wedding Present. Hotels in nearby Stratford-Upon-Avon seemed perpetually haunted by the forlorn figure of Keith from The Prodigy, found wandering their corridors in the later early hours. It was all, I guess, very much of its time.
In that spirit, one year in the middle of the decade, the festival witnessed a clandestine special show. I can’t pretend to have seen it myself; I was languishing backstage, some way after midnight, when a friend returned from the dance tent in a state of some excitement. There, he had witnessed a deeply experimental, semi-improvised drum’n’bass set by a band billed as the Tao Jones Index. Their frontman, a notable lyrical collagist, appeared to be making up a lot of the words as he went along. Frequently, he would intone, with quasi-operatic portent, a newish buzzword of the time: “<>The Internet!<>”
This, I realise, is not how most people would likely remember David Bowie. But it strikes me today, in the wake of yesterday’s terrible news, that it’s a valuable way of understanding the nature of this most fearless of musicians. Many tributes in the past 24 hours have presented Bowie as a man of impeccable taste, as an artist whose every creative whim produced a cultural revolution.
And yes, of course, Bowie’s hit rate of innovation is probably higher than any other performer, never mind ones who operated for such a sustained length of time at such an exalted commercial level. But one of the keys to his genius, as the Tao Jones Index business illustrated so well, was that he was spectacularly unafraid of failing. The danger of looking daft was not something which seemed to bother Bowie unduly: for a man habitually associated with an elevated concept of cool, he was rarely afraid to place that coolness in jeopardy. In fact, the one time he seemed to try and insulate himself from potential embarrassment, he ended up in Tin Machine.
Risk was critical to the whole Bowie endeavour, a sense that preposterous ideas – ideas which could fall flat, could potentially end in humiliation – could just as easily turn out to reconfigure our ideas of what a pop star could be, what pop could do. As we sit hear and try to come to terms with the loss, and at the same time attempt to measure out the mind-boggling scope and impact of his career, I think it’s useful to see Bowie’s journey as a long-distance highwire walk. A mutant-jazz album as valediction? How on earth would that work?
Anyhow, we’re currently working, as you might imagine, on a special edition of Uncut. In the meantime, you can still pick up a copy of our Ultimate Music Guide to Bowie, and we have a further Ultimate Music Guide going on sale this week – this one dedicated to The Byrds, and the subsequent illustrious solo careers of their various members. That goes on sale in the UK now, and you can pick up a copy of our Byrds Ultimate Music Guide from our online shop.
Few multi-million-selling albums, grounded so thoroughly within the MOR landscape, puzzle more than Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 double album Tusk. The stories of its reception are well known. After the wild success of Rumours, the five-piece, led by the songwriting trio of Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, and completed by rhythm section John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, refused to rest on laurels – especially Buckingham, who’d been listening to post-punk and new wave, later telling Uncut that this new music had offered him “a little room to deprogram and reaffirm things – to retrieve my own style”.
The outcome was ten months in the studio, costs of around one million dollars, and an album that McVie herself once described as “very different, very Lindsey Buckingham”, and which Buckingham recently told critic Jen Boyles was “the most important album we made, but only because it drew a line in the sand that for me defined the way I still think today.” But painting it Buckingham’s baby (soon after its release, when it was clear it wouldn’t repeat the success of Rumours, it was referred to as ‘Lindsey’s folly’) does grave disservice to the group’s two other songwriters, who met Buckingham’s experiments with more subtle, yet no less effective, sideways steps.
On Tusk, McVie embraced an ambiguity that she never quite articulated before or since: the album’s opener, “Over & Over”, begins as though it’s suspended in mid-air, a music always in the process of becoming, while the song’s protagonist sketches out uncertain emotional territory. Nicks contributes the album’s most resonant, Mac-esque songs – several of her classics appear on Tusk, including the breathtaking “Sara” (which gains a few minutes of aquatic drift on the alternate version on Disc Three of this deluxe edition, more of which later), and one of her most epic melodramas, “Sisters Of The Moon”. But it’s fair to say the album’s legend rests on the wildness of Buckingham’s experiments, such as curiosities like the taut elastic snap of “The Ledge”, or the modular drum tattoos of “Tusk” – the album’s most experimental song, it was, tellingly, released as the lead single.
From here, the deluxe edition stretches out, firstly with a disc of single versions, remixes and studio sessions. The former are flotsam – truncations or minor alterations that ultimately flag how deceptively consummate Tusk really is, as a strongly conceptualised, archly constructed double album. More compelling are the studio sessions, particularly when we reach Buckingham’s material, from a bluesy twist around “Out On The Road”, which would eventually become “That’s Enough For Me”, through to multiple versions – six of “I Know I’m Not Wrong”, five of “Tusk” itself – from sessions across 1978 and 1979.
The various takes of “Tusk” simply further unveil the borderline-ridiculousness, and thus the heroic hubris, of the song. Charting the progression of “I Know I’m Not Wrong”, however, through its various forms, from scratchy demo through off-the-cuff guitar-and-drums performance, to its more considered iterations, suggests the group relished the potential to rewrite and rebuild in the studio. The third disc, which features an alternate Tusk constructed of session outtakes, proves this – “What Makes You Think You’re The One”, for example, missing the chord at the beginning of the chorus that pivots the song into next gear, is a much looser performance, with Buckingham’s vocals strained and stretched.
A common theme from the alternate mix is one of Tusk denuded. An acoustic “Storms”, Nicks swooning between two glinting guitars, is gorgeous, and suggests that a stripped-back Fleetwood Mac album would have offered plenty; the subtle reveal of McVie’s “Honey Hi” is stealthier, the alternate version mustering its melancholy energies from piano and a twitching, Lissajous-curve guitar figure. “Angel” is far more intimate than in its final manifestation, with a tart, stinging guitar highlighting Nick’s understated vocals; “Sisters Of The Moon”, on the other hand, floods the sensorium with waves of organ and guitar, draping the song with even more lustrous fabrics.
If you splash out for the five-disc set, you also get two discs of previously unreleased live material from the ’79/’80 Tusk Tour, mostly drawn from shows at Wembley, Tucson and St Louis. Cherry-picking from Tusk and Rumours, with a few outliers, these are strong performances, but they add little when it comes to illuminating the intrigue of Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac. And that’s, ultimately, where this deluxe edition comes unstuck. There was a fine opportunity here to really delve into those storied sessions, to pull together, and subsequently pull apart, the mercurial magic of this music, to show the breadth of experiment and risk undertaken, and to detail just how the album’s peculiar, light-dappled production came about.
That’s not to sneeze at what we have here: the studio sessions on the second half of Disc Two, and the alternate Tusk of Disc Three, much of which was previously unreleased, is plenty illuminating. But Tusk is strong stuff, surprisingly unyielding in its intrigue. As a document of a group responding to mega-success by both experimenting wildly, pushing the studio-as-instrument to places that usually only an Eno would go, and by introverting in response to Rumours’ interpersonal melodramas, it’s still a bristling, staggering listen.
PJ Harvey has announced additional festival dates for 2016.
She plays Norway’s Øya festival, which takes place at Tøyenparken, Oslo, between August 9 and 13.
She will also play Sweden’s Way Out West, which takes place in Slottsskogen Park, Gothenburg between Thursday August 11 and Saturday August 13.
It’s not yet been confirmed which specific days Harvey will play.
Harvey previously announed a headline slot at Field Day at London’s Victoria Park on June 12.
PJ Harvey has released a teaser trailer for her new album.
Harvey’s ninth studio album documents her journeys to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, D.C.
The album – as yet untitled – was recorded during her month long residency at Somerset House, Recording in Progress, in which audiences were given the opportunity to see Harvey at work with her band and producers in a purpose-built studio.
Robert Plant has announced tour dates running during March.
He will embark on the “Blues… Roots and Hollers (A Southern Journey)” tour with The Sensational Space Shifters.
“I’m always eager to return to the hospitality of the Southern states,” Plant says. “Towns and cities that hold fond memories for me personally, places that gave birth to so much of the music I love. Our recent travels have taken this wild whirlwind of a band though many incredible and inspiring places, from TK to TK. Having just begun work on our new album, we thought we’d take time out to raise a little sand and welcome springtime with one more adventure, another celebration of life and song.”
The tour dates are:
MARCH 4 – 6 – Okeechobee, Florida – Okeechobee Music & Arts Festival
6 – St. Augustine, Florida – St. Augustine Amphitheatre
7 – Mobile, Alabama – Saenger Theatre
9 – Jackson, Mississippi – Thalia Mara Hall
10 – Baton Rouge, Louisiana – River Center Theatre
11 – Shreveport, Louisiana – Shreveport Municipal Auditorium
13 – Cain’s Ballroom – Tulsa, Oklahoma
15 – The Bomb Factory – Dallas, Texas
17 – San Antonio, Texas – Tobin Center for the Performing Arts
18 – Midland, Texas – Wagner Noel Center Performing Arts Center
20 – Austin, Texas – ACL Live at Moody Theater
In other news, Plant has contributed an exclusive version of Elbow’s “The Blanket Of Night” to The Long Road, a new concept record benefitting the British Red Cross. Set for release on March 4th, The Long Road is available now for pre-order on the iTunes Store and on CD, LP, and Limited Edition Red LP via Kartel. All profits from The Long Road go to the British Red Cross.
Plant also recently unveiled “Light Of Christmas Day“, his first new collaboration with Alison Krauss in almost 10 years. Featured in the film, Love The Coopers, the song marks the first release by the duo since Raising Sand. “Light Of Christmas Day” is available now on the iTunes Store and all other digital retailers.
