The first volume of Bill Fay demos Still Some Light will be out available on vinyl January 14th via Dead Oceans
Here's the scoop...
Dead Oceans has announced a two-part re-issue of Bill Fay’s 'Still Some Light', a double album compilation made up of 70s album demos and 2009 home recordings, available for the first time on vinyl. 'Still Some Light Part 1' is set for release on January 14, 2022.
Still Some Light was originally released on compact disc as a two CD collection in 2010. Reimagined with new artwork and available for the first time ever on vinyl, Still Some Light Pt. 1, collects Fay’s archival recordings from 1970 and 1971. Many of the songs are intimate sketches which were eventually re-recorded for Fay’s landmark second album, Time of the Last Persecution. The announcement follows the release of Countless Branches on January 17, 2020, Fay’s acclaimed seventh studio album and third since his decades-long hiatus.
For the upcoming release of Still Some Light Part 1, David Tibet, a long-time fan and collaborator of Bill Fay’s, wrote the following introduction:
It must have been around 2000 that I first heard of Bill Fay. The artist and polymath, Jim O’Rourke, asked me if I had ever heard of him. Like almost everyone in the world, apart from rare-vinyl obsessives, I said I hadn’t. Jim then extolled Fay’s virtues in a fascinating pæan to him and his creations, and I was already hooked without having heard anything Bill had created.
There was a See For Miles CD which included both of Bill’s incredibly rare albums from 1969 and 1970, as well as his sole single from 1967. I bought it, put it on, and in swept “The Garden Song”. From that very first song, I knew I had discovered the artist who, for me, was the greatest singer-songwriter I had ever heard.
So I had to find Bill Fay. But there were very few leads out there; the usual comment was based on the cover of Time of the Last Persecution—“I think he’s somewhere leading a religious group”; “he’s disappeared completely’; “he’s become a Christian hermit somewhere”. Through various synchronicities I did manage to find Bill and we have been very good friends now for almost a quarter of a century, so I hope Bill won’t mind my stating he is indeed a very private man.
I spoke with Bill Stratton and Gary Smith, two of the people who had worked with him in The Bill Fay Group, and on the recording sessions which eventually became the Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow album, first released by our Durtro Jnana label as a CD in 2005.
I was honoured and delighted to get to know Bill well. Bill is the kindest, most generous, most supportive, most gentle, and most talented of men. Anyone reading this, I am sure, already knows of the profundity, and simplicity, of his work, and the intense emotional truth and honesty it carries—all of which Bill himself also has in his soul. Still Some Light, which you now are offered, was the second release we did with Bill, a collection of treasures from the Bill Fay treasure-chest, full of delights, and reality, and as real as rainbows. – David Tibet, Hastings 18 October 2021
Alongside, a special series of 7" singles will be released, consisting of different musicians’ interpretations of Bill Fay classics. First up, Steve Gunn covers a personal favourite, 'Dust Filled Room' (check the clip below) will be followed by Kevin Morby's version of 'I Hear You Calling.'
"Bill Fay’s music was a revelation to me when I first discovered it: the commanding power of his words; the modest, universal language of his sorrow. And listening to his music still makes me feel as if an old friend had been lingering in the shadows, emerging at just the right time. It was a real honour to record one of my favourites of his, Dust Filled Room." – Steve Gunn, Brooklyn, NY
"Suffolk" is off Jeff Parker's new album Forfolks out Dec 10th via International Anthem/Nonesuch. Watch Cauleen's video below.
Here's the scoop from video director/editor Cauleen Smith...
"Back in 2018 I invited an intergenerational group of women to help me make some moving-images in Noah Purifoy’s Desert Museum in Joshua Tree. The resulting film, 'Sojourner,' contemplates centuries of black feminist mysticism and cultural production. Something about Jeff’s 'Suffolk' reminded me of waking up at four in the morning so that we could catch that sun rise, then napping until 4 pm so that we could ready for sunset. Our film depended on being sensitive to and present for the orbit of our planet, the loop around the sun."
Jeff Parker and Steve Gunn kick off a co-headlining tour in December. For tickets and info go here.
UK singer/songwriter Michael Chapman's True North album (produced by Steve Gunn) is out February 8th on Paradise of Bachelors.
The masterful follow-up to his universally celebrated 2017 album 50, Michael Chapman’s True North finds the elder statesman of British songwriting and guitar plumbing an even deeper deep and honing an ever keener edge to his iconic writing. This authoritative set of predominantly new, and completely devastating, songs hews to a more intimate sonic signature—more atmospheric, textural, and minimalist than 50, stately and melancholy in equal measure. Recorded in rural West Wales, True North unflinchingly surveys home and horizon, traveling from the Bahamas to Texas to the Leeds of Chapman’s childhood, haunted by the mirages of memory and intimations of mortality. Joining him on this introspective journey is a cast of old friends and new disciples: once again Steve Gunn produces and plays guitar, and fellow UK songwriting hero Bridget St John sings, collaborating with cellist Sarah Smout and legendary pedal steel player BJ Cole, who has accompanied everyone from John Cale to Scott Walker to Terry Allen to Björk. Check out "It's Too Late" below.
Michael Chapman’s elegiac new record True North, the latest chapter in the long story of one of our greatest living guitar stylists and songwriters, navigates the same treacherous and tenebrous territory of time. The album begins with the gnawing regret of “It’s Too Late,” and every song Chapman sings thereafter directly references the passing of time—its blind ruthlessness, its sweet hazy delights—in noirish language almost mystical in its terseness and precision. (The two transportive, gorgeous instrumentals, one per side, both have appropriately evocative—though decidedly not Northern—pastoral place names for titles: Eleuthera is an island in the Bahamas where Chapman habitually holidays every winter, and Caddo Lake straddles the border between Texas and Louisiana.) This is Chapman at his darkest and most nocturnal, yes, but also his most elegant and subtle, squinting into the black hours with an unseen smile.
“Sometimes no disguise is the best disguise of all,” he sings on the unaccompanied ballad “Vanity & Pride,” offering a lyrical key to unlock the album. By the time True North is out in the world, Chapman will be seventy-eight years old and will have released nearly as many records, a staggering achievement. True North represents the most nakedly personal album of his career, his most authoritative, unguarded, and emotionally devastating statement. His universally celebrated full-band 2017 album 50 flirted with much-deserved triumphalism, offering a retrospective of his illustrious career, revisited in the company of the fellow UK songwriting hero Bridget St John and a rowdy gang of younger acolytes including Steve Gunn, James Elkington, and Nathan Bowles. (Intergenerational collaboration has been central to Chapman’s periodic reinventions and perennial relevance since the 1960s—he is the only musician ever to have played with Mike Cooper, Mick Ronson, Elton John, Don Nix, Thurston Moore, and Jack Rose.) The distinguished quartet of old friends and new disciples that supports him on True North features old friends and new disciples alike, but the sonic strategy this time is intentionally subtractive rather than additive. Once again Steve Gunn produces and plays guitar, and Bridget St John sings, collaborating with cellist Sarah Smout and legendary pedal steel player BJ Cole, who has accompanied everyone from John Cale to Scott Walker, Elton John to Terry Allen, Felt to Björk to Brian Eno. Cole is the album’s secret weapon, contributing sublime, skyscrapingly sculptural steel leads, weaving in sympathetic warp and weft with Chapman’s and Gunn’s guitars and Smout’s hovering cello.
Throughout the band hews to an intimate, hushed sonic signature that is more atmospheric, textural, and minimalist than 50, stately and melancholy in equal measure. Without a regular rhythm section—Gunn and Chapman provide occasional, austere drums and bass on an ad hoc basis—arrangements drift dreamily, ebbing and flowing, following Chapman’s confiding growl and helical guitar figures wherever they lead. Michael cites the Jimmy Giuffre Trio’s performance, without a rhythm section, in the 1959 film Jazz on a Summer’s Day as “a revelation” and direct influence on True North. The production hearkens back to Chapman’s classic Millstone Grit (1973), as well as recalling Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (1997); True North shares something of that album’s spectral gloaming, midnight heartache, and sly, self-knowing winks. Integral to the shift in scale and the production decisions were the remoteness and natural beauty of the recording environment. True North was recorded at Mwnci Studios, a residential studio in rural, woodland West Wales. Jimmy Robertson, who has earned nine Mercury Music nominations for his work with the likes of Depeche Mode, Ride, and Arctic Monkeys, engineered and mixed.
Compositionally, True North finds Chapman plumbing an even deeper deep and honing an ever keener edge to his iconic writing. Compared to 50, these recordings feel narrower in range, less overtly narrative and dynamic and more impressionistic and restrained, but they are correspondingly more piercing and arrow-like in their rending impact, more concerned with an archer’s deadeye aim than pyrotechnics. And Chapman’s aim remains true. Whereas 50 featured two new songs among radical reinterpretations of material from Chapman’s deep catalog, True North includes twice as many new numbers among its quiver of eleven arrows—“It’s Too Late,” “Eleuthera,” the fiery “Bluesman,” and slow-rolling album centerpiece “Truck Song”—confirming the exultant return of Chapman the songwriter. The other songs were selected from various obscure corners of Chapman’s vast catalog (“Youth Is Wasted on the Young” was previously recorded with Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke for a compilation, for example.) In these renderings they receive their definitive treatments, utterly transformed. “After All This Time” and “Full Bottle, Empty Heart,” two of the moving duets with St John, are as weightless and lovely as “Hell to Pay” is alternately brooding and menacing.
True North zooms in and focuses the lens more tightly not just musically, but also visually. The title suggests the geography of memory, evoking the Northern England that is Chapman’s home, ancestral and current. Born and raised in Leeds, for many years he has lived in isolated, ravishing Cumbria, near Hadrian’s Wall and the Scottish border. The jacket photographs date to 1963, when Chapman was working as a photography instructor at a college in Bolton, Lancashire, after completing his postgraduate degree. During this period he stopped playing music for three years to concentrate on visual art. It’s fitting that these beautiful, ghostly images of a vanished North grace the album artwork, because, more than any other record in his oeuvre, True North surveys home and horizon.
Following the levitating lament “Youth Is Wasted on the Young,” Chapman leaves us with a moment of levity, the solo number “Bon Ton Roolay.” Appropriately, this sole moment of unbounded joy and ragged hangover humor dissolves. It remains unfinished, unseamed and tossed aside with a chuckle. The work of time is never done. Where Chapman says good times, he means years, means life.
Steve Gunn's new album Way Out Weather was released on October 7. Watch his Tiny Desk Concert below.
Steve Gunn is a New York-based guitarist and songwriter. With a career spanning nearly fifteen years, Steve has produced volumes of critically acclaimed solo, duo, and ensemble recordings. His astounding solo albums, as well as his work with GHQ and longtime collaborating drummer John Truscinski, represent milestones of contemporary guitar-driven, forward music. A voracious schedule of international performances has cultivated a fervent fanbase for Gunn’s music throughout the world. These days you can find him playing with his band as well as sometimes serving as guitarist in fellow Philadelphia-bred troubadour Kurt Vile’s band the Violators.
Mining the catalogs of Basho, Bull, Chapman, and Sharrock, among other titans of stringed-things and record-session royalty, Steve has steadily processed these inspirations into a singular, virtuosic stream. Friendships and collaborations with Jack Rose, Tom Carter, Meg Baird, Mike Cooper, and Michael Chapman colored the disciplined evolution of the discursive, deconstructed blues sound, at once transcendent and methodical, that is now Gunn’s signature. Close listening reveals the influence of Delta and Piedmont country blues, ecstatic free jazz, and psych, as well as Gnawa and Carnatic music, on the continually unfolding compositions.
Gunn’s 2009 solo album, Boerum Palace (availble here), demonstrated a fully realized power for songcraft; Steve started to sing more and developed a commanding vocal style equal to his guitar practice. His acclaimed instrumental duo recordings with Truscinski, Sand City (2010) and Ocean Parkway (2012), cemented his place among the top of his peers, both present and past. These documents display Gunn’s compositional penchant for charting musical travelogues that ramble through city and wilderness alike. Dispatches home are not merely descriptive but corporeal; the evocative, rhythmic power of his writing and phrasing carries the listener along bodily. Steve builds songs as exploratory vessels, opens them up for mechanical tinkering, and lives in them through ceaseless improvisatory permutations.
In 2013 Paradise of Bachelors released Time Off, his first album as leader of a trio including longtime friends John Truscinski on drums and Justin Tripp on bass, and a record on which Steve’s compelling singing features more prominently than ever before. The album features his oblique character sketches and story-songs about friends, acquaintances, and denizens of his Brooklyn neighborhood, using the trio band format to launch his compositions into new, luminous strata. This is Gunn at the top of his game, writing his most memorable tunes and lyrics, utterly unique but steeped in traditions both vernacular and avant-garde.
A heady and elliptical travelogue, Gunn’s follow-up, Way Out Weather (available via Paradise Of Bachelors), demonstrates a radical widescreen evolution, featuring a larger band and lighting out for lusher, more expansive, and impressionistic territories than Time Off. This is the virtuosic guitarist and songwriter’s career-defining statement to date.
