Grant Lee Phillips & His New CD
Friday, March 24, 2006
http://www.grantleephillips.com/index.html
Newsworthy
January 2006
Greetings all:
Here’s to a brand new year! The presses have collected some dust over the holiday season, nevertheless I’m delighted to crank up the wheels once again. Thus far, we’re off to a vigorous start. Having initiated an album of some of my favorite cover tunes some time ago, I’m finally approaching the finish line. Gravitating towards some of the most influential songs and artists of my formative years, I settled on eleven tracks, generally culled from the era that brought you Reganomics, frozen yogurt and dayglow. NINETEENEIGHTEES exhumes an age whose underground music has long outlasted the more popular songs of it’s airwaves. At least for me, anyway, and that’s basically the spirit of this album.
It’s my personal mix tape, just as it’s reeled around in my head for decades. In truth, there nothing like the real thing. The originals are thankfully available and easily itunable for the most part. And yet these melodies, these words demand to be sung, strummed and passed down as is oral tradition. What’s taken shape in the late hours of my downtime is a semi-acoustic rendering of cult classics by The Pixies, Joy Division, REM, The Cure, Robyn Hitchcock, The Church, Nick Cave, New Order, Echo And The Bunnymen and The Smiths. My aim was to highlight the lyrical and melodic strength of these songs. In some cases, free the song of it’s burdensome production, an unfortunate carbon dating of the period.
My own NINETEENEIGHTEES dwells somewhere between the minimal acoustic realm of LADIES LOVE ORACLE and the subtle rythmic backing of VIRGINIA CREEPER. I played and recorded about 99% of the instruments myself, acoustic and electric guitars, bass, keyboards, ukulele, lap steel, mandolin and hand percussion. I also enjoyed the addition of drummer-Kevin Jarvis, bassist - Dave Carpenter and violinist-Eric Gorfain on a few select tracks. As I got inside of these songs, with nothing much more than a guitar or a piano, their personality came through on new levels and my appreciation for them ever deepened. While their influences are often sited today, you would be hard pressed to find most of these bands on the Billboard charts of the 1980s however.
None of this really mattered then, nor does it now. For all of the hacky, plastic being pooped out of the corporate labels back in the 1980s, for every hokey hair band there was once an alternative, a parallel universe, existing just below the conservative, pastel surface. It was the same unstoppable energy that would come to erupt in the form of Nirvana in the early 90s. NINETEENEIGHTEES is a nod to some of the songs and some of the people that made a lasting impact on my own songwriting and musicianship.
Some of these artists, I’ve got to know and work with over the years. This is something of great personal value. It’s also the source of some anxiety and my apologies to them in advance for the sum total of disfigured chords and apostrophe abuses. Mostly I want to thank them for writing these songs that I’ve been singing along to for so long.
I hope you will too.
Grant-Lee
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After reading about Buffalo Tom I decided to check on one of my other favorite musicians Grant Lee Phillips. I didn't know about this project and I am very excited to hear it. The Pixies, Joy Division, REM, The Cure, Robyn Hitchcock, The Church, Nick Cave, New Order, Echo And The Bunnymen and The Smiths, its like listening to Woxy Vintage but being sung by Grant Lee. Cover cds can be hit or miss but I have a feeling this one will be out of the park, you can't go wrong with songs from these legends. Mark Lanegan just released a duet earlier this month which is fantastic. Now if only Mike Johnson, Nick Cave, Ryan Adams and the Cure were to release something, 2006 would shape up to be the best year in music in a long time.
Posted by mardenhill 3/24/2006 01:28:00 PM
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