Sarah Lee Guthrie & Family (daughter of Arlo Guthrie)
"Go Waggaloo" (producers: Johnny Irion, John Smith; guests: Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Tao Rodriguez Seeger; first single: "'Cuz We're Cousins"; Hear/read here; MP3 Download)
BTW: What was Heavy Trash's manifesto for "Midnight Soul Serenade," a goal they wanted to achieve?"
"It's hard to say we had a concrete goal in mind when we started making the record," Verta-Ray tells P&P. "The idea that guided us during the process was that the cycle of touring, stopping, recording, stopping, touring was an artificial one and not very healthy for musicians or the creative urge. We resolved to be writing and recording the whole time we toured on the last album and so scheduled writing and tracking sessions throughout the period when we would normally only be traveling around a playing live shows.
"We wrote and recorded at our New York studio and also at Liam Watson's famous ToeRag studio in London. When we stopped to take stock of what we had in the can there were 26 songs to choose from! So the shape the album finally took was more a process of elimination than of trying to fill up the record with enough songs — a pretty enviable position to be in. I think we're gonna try the same technique in the future. It seems to us that musicians since the dawn of recorded music have generally had this more organic approach to the life of playing and documenting. We felt it was better to establish our own rhythm for laying things down and that's how this record took its shape."
Spencer: "I seem to remember early on Matt and I planning to record an entire album's worth of 1 minute-long songs. And all songs would have to be recorded and mixed in under six hours. We gave up on that, or forgot about it, and quickly moved to NO manifesto, besides wanting to push ourselves and make a really good album. Like Matt writes, we wrote and recorded many songs, too many. We had a lot of up-tempo rock 'n' roll and rockabilly numbers, songs that we had been performing live. These are great songs and the recordings came out just fine, but when it came time to sequence the album, these songs just didn't seem to fit. We wanted to say something new and to speak in a new way. Thus we got the 'Midnight Soul Serenade.'"
And what did guests Mickey Finn, Lambchop's Sam Baker, PowerSolo and Those Darlins bring to the table?
Verta-Ray: "We ran across Mickey Finn (his real name!) when he was repairing an old piano Jon had bought. Jon heard him testing it out and asked him to come down to the studio. He could play virtually any style and knocked us out. He's since also toured with Boss Hog.
"Sam Baker is a gem and we were lucky to have found him during a rare fallow period. He played on many of the songs on the new album and will be a big part of our touring band for this album.
"PowerSolo are our old friends from Denmark. We've toured a lot with this talented group who double as our rhythm section when on tour. The tracks we got them on for this record were recorded on the road in the middle of a tour when they were at their hottest.
"Those Darlins are another great group in their own right. They kindly came down to the studio to do some harmonizing and background singing when they were on tour (they hail from Murfreesboro, Tenn.) and added that special sweetness the group of songs needed."
"Never Been Gone" (a re-working of past hits and album tracks, including "Anticipation," "You're So Vain" and "You Belong to Me," done in mostly an acoustic vein; Hear here)
(Iris, Oct. 26, 2009)
Squirrel Nut Zippers, The
"Lost at Sea" (band's first album in nine years; recorded live at Southpaw in Brooklyn, N.Y.; Hear here; Vinyl)
(Southern Broadcasting/MRI, Oct. 26, 2009)
Rod Stewart
"Soulbook" (covers of '60s/'70s soul hits; guests: Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Mary J. Blige, Jennifer Hudson; Hear here; see related reissue below; MP3 Download)
"The Sounds of Christmas 2009" (contributors: William Shatner, Huey Lewis, Richard Marx, Stephen Bishop, Dennis DeYoung, etc.; benefits Shatner's Hollywood Charity Horse Show; Hear here)
(SOC Music, Oct. 27, 2009)
Various artists
"songs from The Point!" (covers of Nilsson songs from the 1971 animated TV special; contributors: Nada Surf, DeVotchKa, Andrew Bird, etc.; Hear here)
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