Earlier this year, the Portland, OR-based Blitzen Trapper accomplished a unique feat for a rock band who has been releasing albums and touring for the better part of two decades: a staged musical titled Wild & Reckless that ran for 28 performances at Portland Center Stage. Today, the band is announcing a new album of the same title that was born from the stage production and as a companion to their 2008 breakthrough album Furr.
The band has premiered “Rebel,” the first single to be released from the forthcoming album, which can be seen below…
“‘Rebel’ is a song about a guy who for the love of a girl follows in his father’s footsteps only to find it to be a scam,” explains principal and frontman Eric Earley. “After several tries at the American dream he ends up selling cocaine to blue bloods in the Hollywood hills. Something of a lost Raymond Carver story with shambling near-country soundtrack.”
The album Wild & Reckless was born from the stage production that the band spent the better part of a year producing. The half musical, half rock-opera dealt with heroin abuse, desperation, true love and western power structures. The story evoked a bygone era of Portland with this sci-fi love story, featuring a rock-and-roll score that paired unreleased songs with favorites from the band’s catalog.
Following the success of the production, the band took 7 original songs from the production and developed the theme further into the 12 songs that comprise the new album Wild & Reckless.
- Frontman Eric Earley also sees the record as a companion and extention of their 2008 album Furr. “Wild and Reckless is something like a cross-eyed stepchild to Furr, in that it chronicles the darker dystopian stories of rural and suburban west coast death-drive via a riffing psychedelic landscape. Ten years after Furr with all its talk of murder and the end of the western world, it seems there’s more to tell.”
