The first of this week’s sizzlers comes from Joni Mitchell, who stunned the Newport Folk Festival audience last summer when she gave a surprise performance – her first in 20 years – delivering a heartfelt set filled with some of her greatest songs. Mitchell’s triumphant return to the stage on 24 July 2022 is now featured on a new live album, At Newport, which has been produced with close collaborator Brandi Carlile. Mitchell delighted the audience, blending her voice with the other singers on stage on classics like ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, ‘A Case Of You’, and ‘Both Sides Now’. For good measure, she even flashed her guitar prowess, playing a solo instrumental version of ‘Just Like This Train’.
12 is an intimate collection of twelve compositions by Ryuichi Sakamoto, selected from the musical sketches he recorded like a sound diary during his recent two-and-a-half-year battle with cancer. Each numbered title refers to its recording date. About the album, Sakamoto says: “…after I finally ‘came home’ to my new temporary housing after a big operation, I found myself reaching for the synthesizer. I had no intention of composing something; I just wanted to be showered in sound. I’ll probably continue to keep this kind of ‘diary.’”
The 19-track Melodies on Hiatus was crafted in a most experimental style: Albert Hammond Jr and his writing partner, the Canadian songwriter and poet Simon Wilcox, never met in person during the process. They had lengthy conversations via the telephone; Simon would jot down notes from Albert’s stream of consciousness and draft the lyrics on her typewriter and drop them into his letterbox. Albert then wove these lyrics into the melodies he had already crafted. The songwriting process became a long distant “anonymous love affair of ideas and lyrics”. The album covers themes of childhood, surviving adolescence, adulthood, vulnerability, fame, relationship with self and others, and is Albert’s “deconstructed broken-down ego reaction” to his previous album, 2018’s Francis Trouble.
Wye Oak is Jenn Wasner (of Bon Iver, Flock of Dimes) and Andy Stack (of Helado Negro, Joyero). The duo’s musical partnership bloomed in the uncertainty of this four-year period, whenever they felt that Wye Oak had something to say. They shifted to quickly writing, recording, and releasing digital EPs and singles. To Stack, there is a thread running through what is seemingly chaos, “finding cheer in the doom of the world”. Every Day Like the Last does just that, reminding the listener of the new heights Wye Oak have reached since 2018’s The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs, while gazing into the unknown of what’s ahead. The title of this collection acknowledges that duality, posing it like a question: is it “every day like the day before it” or “every day like the last day on Earth”?
Swans’ 16th studio album, The Beggar, was written and produced by founding member Michael Gira with contributions from recent and former Swans members, members of Angels of Light, and guest Swan Ben Frost. The album emerged from the 2020 lockdown, as Gira explains: “After numerous pandemic-induced cancellations of tours for the previous Swans album, leaving meaning, and an apparent bottomless pit of waiting, waiting, waiting, and the strange disorientation that came with this sudden but interminable forced isolation, I decided it was time to write songs for a new Swans album and forget about everything else. They came relatively easily, always informed by the suspicion that these could be my last. When I finally was able to travel, songs in hand, to Berlin to work with my friends recording this record, the feeling was akin to the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the film changes from black and white to colour. Now I’m feeling quite optimistic. My favourite colour is pink. I hope you enjoy the album.”
Our release of the week is Lloyd Cole’s latest work, On Pain – his thirteenth solo album, following 2019’s critically acclaimed Guesswork. The new album consists mainly of electronic sounds. Once Cole had formulated a sonic picture of the record he wanted to make, the arrival of each new song gradually brought that picture into focus. His distinctive voice and sophisticated lyricism invite the listener into the mindset of someone who has reached old age and is coming to terms with this. At times, the experience of listening to On Pain is akin to sitting in a sleek, state-of-the-art departure lounge, unsure of quite where you’re waiting to go.
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