Mike Polizze: Long Lost Solace Find (PoB-048)

$9.00 – $31.00

Or support via: Bandcamp (LP/Transparent Blue LP/CD/DL) | Other Options (physical/digital/int’l)

We hope you’re hanging in there.

As the days tick by along the arc of our new, circumscribed lives, it’s been helpful for us here at PoB to look ahead to open up new space in our minds. Summer is approaching, and we humbly hope Long Lost Solace Find can serve as your soundtrack to a truly weird season. 

The debut solo album by Mike Polizze—and his first release for Paradise of Bachelors—finds the erstwhile Purling Hiss (Drag City) frontman and Birds of Maya shredder stepping out from behind the wall of guitar noise into the bright sunshine. Performed entirely by Polizze with longtime friend Kurt Vile (largely live and acoustic) and recorded by War on Drugs engineer Jeff Zeigler, this intimate Philadelphia affair clarifies the bittersweet earworm melodicism of Dizzy Polizzy’s songwriting, revealing bona fide folk-pop chops. Long Lost Solace Find finally harvests the wild local honey from the buzzing hive of Hiss.

We’re so pleased to welcome Polizze to Paradise. Mike is one of our favorite musicians and human beings. 

Thanks to Pitchfork and Stereogum for helping to spread the word about the announcement.

“This record is largely acoustic, mellow, and almost without electric guitar,” Polizze writes in this sweet handwritten note. With the announcement comes the release of lead single “Revelation,” an instantly winsome number which features Kurt Vile on backing vocals and surprise trumpet, epitomizing Polizze’s fresh sonic approach as a solo artist. 

As Vile puts it: “I love this music so much. ‘Revelation’ is the summer jam I needed, and this is absolutely my summer record. I’m not just sayin’ that because Mike is my bro, and I happened to play and sing on it.” He goes on to say: “I’m so proud and honored to have made the cut on five jams. I remember one day, fresh from the road, I brought over a National resonator that I had just bought on tour… some harmonicas… and my trumpet (on request) and, shit, I gotta say that might be the best trumpet I done laid down in a while’s time… for you, Mike! So many of these songs give me chills.” Kurt reflects further that “I think we all could use these catchy, beautiful jams in our respective quarantines (physical and mental)… I needed this shit! Mike Polizze is the guitar god of Philly, and Jeff Zeigler (recording king) knocked this one out the park, baby.”

For more about the record, its Philadelphia genesis, and some Ben Franklin and hoagie jokes, read the album narrative. 

The deluxe LP edition features 140g vinyl; heavy-duty board jacket; full-color inner sleeve and labels; and high-res Bandcamp download code. The deluxe transparent blue vinyl LP edition is limited to 650 copies. The CD edition features a gatefold board jacket with LP replica art. 

For digital-only preorders, please visit Bandcamp (which also offers uncompressed, high-resolution audio files) or your favorite digital marketplace. Contingent on manufacturing schedules, we will ship your pre-ordered album approximately a week in advance of the July 31, 2020 worldwide release date. All pre-orders include an immediate 320k MP3 download of lead single “Revelation.”

Photo by Constance Mensh.

The story of Long Lost Solace Find is a Philadelphia story. Mike moved from nearby Media, Pennsylvania to Fishtown, Philadelphia in 2004, co-founding Birds of Maya with Jason Killinger (later of Spacin’) and Ben Leaphart (later also of Purling Hiss, Watery Love, et al.) and subsequently falling in with a nascent scene that included the War on Drugs, Kurt Vile, Espers, and the future Founding Fathers of Paradise of Bachelors. In the early years of the new millennium, Philadelphia, and particularly the affordable neighborhoods north of Northern Liberties that attracted artists and musicians, could be a brutal and sinister place, with acres of abandoned and blighted post-industrial blocks ripe for reclamation through thoughtless gentrification. The primeval caveman roar of Birds of Maya—through which Polizze carved savage solos, wielding his guitar like a garotte—reflected that uneasy, transitional urban milieu.

Beginning with his first record as Purling Hiss in 2009, Polizze gradually pivoted to a more pop-inflected idiom that increasingly recalled the classic indie rock of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although, particularly in the early days, it sometimes constituted a de facto solo bedroom project, Purling Hiss eventually released six studio records (on the estimable Woodsist, Richie, and Drag City labels, among others) and toured for ten years as a proper band. Mike never entirely ventured out from behind the moniker, or the clamor. In 2015 Christopher Smith of Paradise of Bachelors urged Polizze to play his first proper solo show under his own name, opening for the Weather Station. The present album developed from that decisive moment, with Polizze, Zeigler, and Vile hunkering down in Uniform Recording to chip away at the twelve songs that would become Long Lost Solace Find.

And what songs! With very little electric guitar and few effects audible, Polizze’s expressiveness and dexterity as a fingerstyle player (not to mention a singer) emerges. The endless hooks sound casual, almost shrugged-off, despite their carefully constructed recursive and ramifying nature. Long Lost Solace Find demonstrates Polizze as a fount of perfectly turned little melodies and riffs and guilelessly sung ditties—not unlike the way that fellow Philadelphian Ben Franklin was a fount of indelible, perfectly phrased aphorisms. Here’s one that feels rather relevant to Mike’s move from the shadows into the sun: “Hide not your Talents, they for Use were made. What’s a sun-dial in the shade!” Long Lost Solace Find represents the apotheosis of Polizze’s evolving craft.