The day after the release of Mountain Tracks Volume 4, the fourth release of their live series from independent label Frog Pad Records Yonder Mountain String Band performed at the historic Tampa Theatre, with opening act Tony Furtado.
Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen are both planning new albums for 2006 — and each will likely launch a tour as well. Dylan has just begun work on his thirty-first studio disc, and Springsteen is wrapping up his first-ever CD of cover songs, focusing on music from the repertoire of folk icon Pete Seeger.
On January 31st, Dylan arrived at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie, New York, with his current touring band. For the next four days, according to Bardavon’s executive director, Chris Silva, the band rehearsed new material. “It was experimental, all kinds of different licks,” Silva told the Poughkeepsie Journal. “They would get into one thing, and they would go over it and over it. Then they would change gears.”
Dylan — whose first announced tour date of 2006 is a performance at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in late April — then moved the operation to Manhattan to lay down his new tunes. His previous studio album, 2001’s acclaimed Love and Theft, was also cut in New York, in just two and a half weeks at Sony Music Studios, with Dylan producing under the name Jack Frost.
Meanwhile, sources familiar with the Springsteen project say that he has nearly completed his covers album, which has the working title The Seeger Sessions and will include both Seeger-penned tunes and American standards the folk patriarch helped popularize. Seeger, 86, is the author of folk classics such as “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
Source rollingstone.com.
Lost Highway has set July 18 as the release date for “Another Fine Day,” the first release in eight years from Golden Smog. The lauded supergroup features Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Soul Asylum’s Dan Murphy, Big Star’s Jody Stephens and the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris, Marc Perlman and Kraig Johnson.
Again sporting separate songwriting contributions from Tweedy, Louris, Perlman, Murphy and Johnson, the band’s fourth album is composed of 14 originals and a cover of the Kinks’ Dave Davies’ “Strangers,” sung by Louris and Tweedy.
The first Golden Smog album to follow both Wilco’s ascension to “it”-band status and reports of a Jayhawks break-up, “Another Fine Day” was recorded last year in two separate sessions, the first sans Tweedy and Stephens in the south of Spain, the second with the full band in Minneapolis.
The songs from the first session, captured in Puerto De Santa Maria, feature Linda Pitmon (Steve Wynn, Zuzu’s Petals) on drums, and vocals from Muni Loco, wife of Paco Loco, who co-produced the disc with Ed Ackerson (Mason Jennings, the Jayhawks) and the band.
Source billboard.com.
