Happy 60th Birthday Wesley Stace!

Cheers to Wes on his 60th! Here are a couple of performances – including one with The Boss and another with Rhett Miller.  

Catch Wesley Stace on tour in Chicago on Oct. 30 and at NYC's City Winery on Nov. 2. Anywhere but Toronto. Get tickets here.

Happy Birthday Wesley Stace!

Cheers to Wes on his birthday! Here's his swingin' World Café performance on WXPN in Philadelphia from 11/12/21. 

The Secret Series #8: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

The Secret Series represents a complete reappraisal of Wesley Stace’s entire musical career, featuring all new solo acoustic recordings and a beautifully designed book to accompany each release, gathering the lyrics for the first time in a uniform edition. 12 albums, 12 books, 155 songs in all, stripped down to their essence with an intimacy that comes only from a solo recording by the songwriter. The books and recordings will be revealed and released over the next two to three years.  

There will be 250 copies of each book. Each numbered and signed lyric book features a new personal introduction that puts each album in context and a contemporary interview that illuminates the original release. With the MUNDANE option, you merely get a beautiful Digital Download of the brand new solo acoustic recording of Who Was Changed & Who Was Dead. Get it right here. 

Happy Birthday Richard Thompson!

Celebrating Richard Thompson's birthday with a few performances and a couple of revealing interviews worth checking. 

LINKS
Stereogum Richard Thompson's albums ranked by Timothy & Elizabeth Bracey

Wesley Stace reprises Late Style's songs solo acoustic

The artist also known as John Wesley Harding is sharing acoustic versions of songs from Late Style. Check the snazzy wardrobe.

LATE STYLE - Solo Acoustic

1 of 13: Where the Bands Are

"'Where the Bands Are' was certainly never meant to be a solo acoustic song but, as everyone says these days, "here we are"! Seems like a good show opener, in whichever version. Enjoy."

 

2 of 13: Everything All the Time

"Today it's 'Everything All The Time,' here minus the beautiful singing of Kelly Hogan and Nora O'Connor Kean but with more whistling to make up for it. (I am modeling a very cosy Rick Owens sweater for those interested in these sorts of details.)"

 

3 of 13: Your Bright Future

It was a real pleasure, and quite hard work, to get inside these songs, particularly this one! And I'll note that it's a totally different version and arrangement from the bonus acoustic version on the LATE STYLE LP, which so far has escaped digitization into any format, and is therefore only available on the wax. Today I am modelling a piece of Bob Dylan merchandise, as featured on the cover of Desire and in the movie Renaldo and Clara.

 

4 of 13: Hey! Director

"I wrote 'Hey! Director' many years ago, and I always loved the lyric. I then wrote more than one melody for it, of which the best can be found on Sings to a Small Guitar Vol 2. (Back then it was called Hey! Director!, a small difference puncutationally, the original inspired by those exclamation marks in Oh! Calcutta!) The song never quite made it on to an album with any tune, yet the lyric kept feeling worth singing, and even more so as time rolled on. So I put it before David Nagler and he came back to me with the lovely tune that made it on to Late Style. His riff was originally the riff from Bob Dylan's I Want You, so I persuaded him to flip it around and it ended up what I'm whistling here." 

This is the older version, if you'd like to compare and contrast: https://johnwesleyharding.bandcamp.com/track/hey-director

(It isn't a competition!)

 

5 of 13: Come Back Yesterday

"Come Back Yesterday was the easiest because a) it's a strummer and b) I play the guitar on this one in the shows. Huzzah! It's going up early today because I am going on Gentleman's Record Shopping Trip. Have a nice weekend. I will put up #6 on Monday and collate the first five this weekend."

 

Wesley Stace turns up the smooth for Late Style

You could say Wesley Stace is wearing the inspiration for the new Late Style album on his sleeve. Great work Tony Stella! 

Here's the scoop from Omnivore Recordings...

With Late Style, Wesley Stace, the artist formerly known as John Wesley Harding, has done things differently. Having begun to put some new lyrics to music, in his usual way, singing to an acoustic guitar, he realized he was coming up with old solutions, reinventing a wheel he had already made, with chord progressions and melodies that worked as folk and pop songs but were not satisfying his desire for something fresh, something he’d be excited to listen to in 2021. So, he turned to David Nagler, the musical director of his portable variety show, the Cabinet of Wonders, to be the Rodgers to his Hart, the Elton to his Bernie, the Bachrach to his David.

Late Style is influenced by artists like Mose Allison, Carla Bley, Nina Simone, Bob Dorough, Steely Dan, Harry Nilsson, Gil Scott-Heron, The Bee Gees, Tom Lehrer, The Carpenters, and even The Partridge Family, without imitating them, so the songs feel modern and “modern” all at once. You can call them uneasy easy listening—smooth, but oddly shaped, with surprising harmonic changes and rhythmic angles. They have the paradoxical flavor of having been written to be hits without any thought of having hits at all.

Though Wesley had originally imagined a record that “a phenomenally well-rehearsed combo might record in a club, perhaps even in front of an audience,” COVID had other plans. But through the mysterious magic of modern technology, the recording came together out of Philadelphia, where Wesley lives; New York, where David built tracks from keyboards, acoustic guitars and virtual instruments; San Francisco, where Wes’s longtime friend and collaborator Chris von Sneidern (a solo artist and sometime member of the Flamin’ Groovies) added electric guitar, vocals, horns and the drums of Prairie Prince (The Tubes, Todd Rundgren, Jefferson Starship); and Chicago, where Kelly Hogan and Nora O’Connor of the Flat Five added harmonies. 

Here's Ilya Mirman's portrait photo of Wesley which Tony Stella turned into the Late Style cover.  

Graphic artist Tony Stella – who recently did the book jacket for Quentin Tarantino's novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – provided the stylish sleeve art for Late Style. Wesley explains how it all came together... 

"Many of you have expressed your enthusiasm for, and asked about, the cover painting for LATE STYLE. Here goes! It's by the genius Tony Stella, whose work can be found here: https://www.tony-stella.com. You should definitely take a look around.

"As we were making the album, I realised I needed something effortlessly authentic for the cover, perhaps a painting like those old records we all love. I'd been following Mr Stella on Twitter for some time, and one morning I was lying in bed, checking out my "feed" (as one does before one fully commits to getting out of bed) and I suddenly realised: "Oh My God! This is fully perfect! It can't even go wrong!" And so I tweeted him, and made an inquiry, and guess what: he said yes. Then I had to work out what the image should be, beyond being a portrait of yours truly.

"So, I got in touch with Ilya Mirman, a brilliant photographer who also happens to be the brother of Eugene Mirman, to a) take some nice promo pics but also b) to get the image that we could send to Tony and he'd paint. I therefore went up to the Boston City Winery (who, due to the kind offices of Michael Bishop and Caitlyn Cooke, let us have the run of the place for a morning), met Ilya there, not to mention David Nagler, and took some pics, quite a few of which you'll see on the inside sleeve of the CD and LP.

"I sent Tony four images, and he apparently chose the one I attach here, perhaps combining it with one of the others (and making sure my collar wasn't askew) to get the actual image for the cover as you see it now. I was blown away. It was actually what I'd imagined, without having quite imagined anything at all, except that I loved all of his work without exception. And thanks to Ilya, of course. 

"Do yourself a favour and check out his stellar Stella work. And then why not head over here and buy one of the astonishing bundles: https://world-wide-wes.myshopify.com/collections/the-late-style-collection"  

You can pre-order Wesley Stace's Late Style right here. Check the track list following the clip of "All The Yous" below. 

 

Wesley Stace – Late Style 

Where The Bands Are

Everything All The Time

Your Bright Future

Hey! Director

Come Back Yesterday

All The Yous

The California Fix

Well Done Everyone

The Impossible She

Do Nothing If You Can

Just Sayin’

How You All Work Me

One For The Weekend: John Wesley Harding

Check out John Wesley Harding's modern folk classic "There's A Starbucks (Where The Starbucks Used To Be)"

John Wesley Harding's "lost" album The Man With No Shadow from 2002 is being issued by Yep Roc on August 29th. 

Here's the scoop...

In May 2002,  just weeks before the release of John Wesley Harding's The Man with No Shadow album, Mammoth Records had their plug pulled. About 300 journalists received advance CDs of Harding's new recording, and a handful of radio stations received the single "Negative Love'. No other physical copies existed. Over the years those advance CDs have fetched untold hundreds of dollars from an eager fan base in search of Wes' great 'lost" album. Though many - but not all - of the songs ended up on 2004's Adam's Apple (DRT Records), which All Music Guide called 'the finest album of his career', those that did make the cut were in a jumbled running order. The album has never previously been released on vinyl. Yep Roc's The Man With No Shadow (First Edition) restores the album to Wes's original vision. The audio has been remastered from the original tapes, and the package includes cover art from the original sessions and extensive liner notes. The CD version includes the original album plus a bonus unheard band demos and studio outtakes, all previously unreleased. The vinyl version is being pressed in an edition of 1,000 copies. Check the track list following the trailer clip below.

John Wesley Harding - The Man With No Shadow (Yep Roc)

SIDE A: 1. Nothing At All 2. Negative Love 3. Monkey and his Cat 4. Sleeper, Awake 

SIDE B: 1. Hard 2. Pull 3. Sussex Ghost Story 4. It Stays 

SIDE C: 1. When You Smile 2. Sluts 3. She Never Talks 4. Already Dead 5. Protest Protest Protest (from Adam's Apple) 

SIDE D (BONUS MATERIAL): 1. Slippery Slide to Bliss (Out-take) 2. Sluts (Demo) 3. Negative Love (Demo) 4. Monkey and his Cat (Demo) 5. Sleeper, Awake (Demo)

Wesley Stace opening for The Jayhawks @ The Opera House, Sunday

Wesley Stace's "Mr. Tangerine Man" and "There's A Starbucks Where The Starbucks Used To Be" are now both concert faves.  

And check out Wesley Stace's John Wesley Harding album on Yep Roc, available right here!