Thanks very much to NPR’s Morning Edition and Joel Rose for this morning’s lovely story on Michael Chapman, in which the Fully Qualified Survivor, along with producer Steve Gunn and critic Andrew Male, looks back at his long career and discusses why Yorkshiremen are cheap, how his career started with a rainstorm, why he never sings sober, and his moving, universally acclaimed new record 50 (which you can order, and hear, below.)
Our friends at the Secretly Group are assembling a durational 100-track compilation to benefit a variety of worthy organizations involved in the resistance against the current oppressive political regime in the U.S. Today, for Day 37, Lavender Country has premiered “Red Dress,” their first new recording to emerge in years. Patrick Haggerty has been on the front lines of civil rights battles for decades. His righteousness is our compass.
We’re excited to welcome to PoB Mr. James Elkington, whose masterful guitar playing and arranging you’ve certainly heard, even if you didn’t realize it. An inveterate collaborator, Jim has been the other guitarist in Steve Gunn’s band since Way Out Weather. He has also toured and/or recorded with Michael Chapman (on 50), Nathan Salsburg (on Ambsace), Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, Joan Shelley, Tortoise, and Brokeback, just to name some of his many enthusiastic admirers. Stay tuned for details on his debut solo album, and catch him onstage this week with Jake Xerxes Fussell and Wilco.
Jake and Jaime are hitting the road this spring—separately, sadly, but in great company. Jake will be touring the pubs, cafes, and boltholes of the UK and EU for the first time, with our bud Daniel Bachman, this April and May, while Mind Over Mirrors will be touring with Brokeback.
If you require a mind-expanding tonic to our national spell of ignorant, truculent insanity, the new Mind Over Mirrors album Undying Color is available today in your favorite record shops and online merchants, digital and physical alike. Listen, read critical acclaim for the album, learn about Secretly Group’s Our First 100 Days Project, and catch up on current and upcoming PoB tours.
Mind Over Mirrors will release their expansive new album of ecstatic drones inspired by the cyclical patterns of the natural world next week. Today The Quietus is streaming the album in full alongside an interview with Mind Over Mirrors mastermind Jaime Fennelly, who discusses expanding the project’s line-up to a full ensemble and how he settled on the album’s title.
After presenting debut single via NPR Music’s Songs We Love, the Durham, North Carolina singer and guitarist now shares “Furniture Man,” a desperate tale of poverty, dispossession, and imminent homelessness, as relevant and heartrending now as it was when first recorded in the 1920s. Aquarium Drunkard calls him “a national treasure.” Jake plays Chapel Hill tonight and opens for Wilco this month and next in Chicago and New York.
On the eve of their first-ever tour of the UK and EU, Nashville’s Promised Land Sound holed up in the studio with Pat Sansone (Wilco) and Billy Bennett (MGMT) to cut their first official recording since their acclaimed 2015 album For Use and Delight. It’s now available as a digital-only single, with a premiere by Clash, who call it “heavenly.”
Mind Over Mirrors has shared “To The Edges,” a strobing, drone-centric track from Undying Color, via XLR8R. Featuring drifting wails from vocalists Haley Fohr (Circuit des Yeux) and Janet Bean (Eleventh Dream Day), as well as percussionist Jon Mueller, it showcases the unique combination of Indian pedal harmonium and analog synthesizer that makes Jaime Fennelly’s music so singular. Don’t miss the Chicago release show at Constellation on March 3.
If you need a distraction from the eldritch horrors of Inauguration Day, take a lesson from the Fully Qualified Survivor. Get thee to your local record store to grip what is shaping up to be one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2017. Or, as Laura Snapes (Pitchfork, NPR, Guardian) recently recommended: “If you’re looking for a peaceful record for this torrid week, 50 is it.” Check out Uncut’s career-spanning 7pp. feature and new rave reviews in The Times, Daily Mirror, i, etc.
