When the pandemic began, and the world shut down, so did the process of creating for Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. In its place was a domesticity that the singer hadn’t felt in a long time, and although it was filled with many rewards, making music was not one of them. Reflecting on that time;

Beam notes:
“I feel blessed and grateful that I and most of my friends and family made it through the pandemic relatively unscathed compared to so many others, but it completely paralyzed the songwriter in me. The last thing I wanted to write about was COVID, and yet every moment I sat with my pen, it lingered around the edges and wouldn’t leave. This lasted for over two years.” The journey back began with a recording session in Memphis to record a handful of Lori McKenna tracks for the EP Lori with friend and producer Matt Ross-Spang. The cathartic experience reconnected Beam with his love for making music, and soon enough the paralysis had passed, and he was finishing lyrics and booking studio time for what would become Light Verse. Light Verse was recorded with engineer and mixer Dave Way at his studio Waystation high up in Laurel Canyon (with an additional session at Silent Zoo Studio with a 24-piece orchestra), with a host of talented musicians joining Beam: Tyler Chester, Sebastian Steinberg, David Garza, Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow, Kyle Crane, and Paul Cartwright. And, Fiona Apple joined Beam on vocals for the duet “All In Good Time.” Beam lyrically once again takes focus on a series of both fictional and personal insights, filled with desperate characters and wide-eyed optimists, offering promise and a dose of heartache, tears and laughter, life and love. Taking stock in the album’s title, he jokes, “Light verse is a form of poetry about playful themes that often uses nonsense and wordplay, and it’s my first official Iron & Wine comedy album!…. Just kidding….”

While true this may be Iron & Wine’s most playful record, Beam says the title mostly reflects the way the songs were born with joy after the heaviness and anxiety of the pandemic. Where recent records like Beast Epic or Weed Garden gave air to the disquiet of middle-aged frailty and brokenness, these songs trade that for the focus acceptance can bring. Moment by moment, they delight in being pointed or silly (or both) and attempt beauty over prettiness.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Sam Beam presents a tenderly melodic suite of swinging symphonies and off-kilter jangle. Pieces like the enthralling opener 'You Never Know' are both wonderfully syncopated and display Sam's ability to switch from breezy to near-chaotic in the blink of an eye, without ever breaking the listening spell. Beautiful.

TRACK LISTING

1. You Never Know
2. Anyone's Game
3. All In Good Time
4. Cutting It Close
5. Taken By Surprise
6. Yellow Jacket
7. Sweet Talk
8. Tears That Don't Matter
9. Bag Of Cats
10. Angels Go Home

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THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 20TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

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IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8PM ON MONDAY APRIL 22ND.

Newly restored and remastered, the updated artwork contains new liner notes from Bill Dahl With this reissue, Right Now! can belatedly assume its proper place in the seminal recorded legacy of Little Richard. ñBill Dahl (from his liner notes) After his incredible run on Specialty Records in the late 1950s, Little Richard released records sporadically throughout the 1960s for a number of established, and not so established, labels. His signing to Warner Bros. in 1970 proved a comeback with three stellar releases for the label: The Rill Thing (1970), The King Of Rock And Roll (1971), and The Second Coming (1972). Those three releases, along with 1986ís Lifetime Friend were expanded and reissued by Omnivore Recordings in 2021. in 1973, he returned with a new single,î In The Name,î on Kent Records. Then, an album appeared on a Kent subsidiary, United Records: Right Now! Right Now!, its genesis, and recording are relatively mysterious. Per Richardís autobiography, the set was cut in one night with Robert ìBumpsî Blackwell in order to secure funds for an upcoming tour. Other than ìIn The Nameî carrying a recording date of January, 1973, thatís all of the information we have. No songwriters are listed on the artwork, and while ìDock Of The Bayî and ìChains Of Loveî looked (and are) familiar, the track ìChain Chain Chainî was in fact the Aretha Franklin classic ìChain Of Fools.î While Richard calls out musiciansí names in the recordings, who they actually are is speculation. What is known is that the album is a scorcher. Richardís barrelhouse keyboards set the tracks jumpingórunning in length from under three to over eight minutes. There are soul ballads (ìDonít You Know Iî), stompers (ìGeraldine Jonesî), and slow blues. Had Richard and Blackwell known that the release would come out as unadorned and poorly distributed as it did, they might have had reservations. But, out it came on a budget label, and was relegated to the cutout bins and never reissued until now. Restored and Remastered, Right Now! returns after 50 yearsófor the first time on CD and Digi

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 20TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

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‘The Endless Coloured Ways’ is a collection of songs by legendary singer/ songwriter, Nick Drake, performed and recorded by over 30 incredible artists from a range of different backgrounds, genres, age groups and audiences. 

From Fontaines D.C to Guy Garvey, and Aurora to Feist, each artist has offered their own incredible take on a timeless classic.

This RSD exclusive 7" Singles Boxset includes eleven tracks across six 7" singles from the original campaign and housed in a brand new exclusive and limited edition collector's box, including an exclusive double sided pullout poster insert Record Store Day UK exclusive for 2024.

TRACK LISTING

Single I
Fontaines DC - 'Cello Song
Let's Eat Grandma - From
The Morning
Single II
Mike Lindsay Featuring
Guy Garvey - Saturday Sun
Katherine Priddy - I Think
They're Leaving Me Behind
Single III
David Gray - Place To Be
Stick In The Wheel - Parasite
Single IV
Bombay Bicycle Club & The Staves - Road
Karine Polwart & Kris Drever - Northern Sky
Single V
Emeli Sandé - One Of These Things First
John Grant - Day Is Done
Single VI
Nick Drake - Tomorrow Is A Long Time (Bob Dylan Cover)

With $10 Cowboy, Charley Crockett didn’t set out to make a themed record. He had released a concept album in 2022, the critically acclaimed Man From Waco, propelling Crockett to new heights and establishing him as one of the leaders of a sparkling revival of traditional country and folk music. For the follow up album, Crockett wrote freely, over a two-month period, as he wound his way across the United States on the back of a tour bus. The resulting songs—raw, personal, vivid portraits of a country in transition—ended up being connected after all. “This material is written at truck stops, it’s written at casinos, it’s written in the alleys behind the venues, it’s written in my truck parked up on South Congress in Austin,” explains Crockett. “A ramblin’ man like me, a genuine transient, is in a pretty damn good position to have something to say about America.” As the album unfolds, you begin to understand that a $10 Cowboy is anyone who has hustled to get by, who didn’t fit in, who has slept on other people’s couches, or the street, who has fallen down, gotten up, and ventured from home chasing a paying gig, or a new start. “Being out on the road gives you a first-hand experience of how different kinds of Americans see themselves as going through some kind of great struggle,” Crockett says. “The roughneck working the oil and natural gas fields in West Texas. The single mother raising kids by herself. The young man working a street corner because he thinks it's his only option. I would be dishonest if I said I couldn’t see the thread. Each of ‘em feel invisible. I am struck by the battles they are fighting internally, and the ways they have been entrapped by what America says they are.” The album was recorded at Arlyn Studios in Austin, produced by Crockett and his long-time collaborator Billy Horton. It was recorded live to tape, with anywhere from 6-12 musicians and backup singers on each track, giving the songs the feel of a live performance. It’s a sound Crockett has been after for years. “Reason I cut it on tape is because when you got the right people in the room, and the great players rise to the occasion when that red light is on and the tape is rolling, you get the magic of a great performance.” It's exactly what he achieved with $10 Cowboy. Regular bandmates Fox, Nathan Fleming, and Mayo Valdez are joined by some of the genre’s most talented players—Rich Brotherton, Kevin Smith, Dave LeRoy Biller, T. Jarrod Bonta and others, including a string quartet. Lauren Cervantes and Angela Miller sing on the album. While the musicianship and accompaniment are exquisite, they are also subtle, placed joyously, yet judiciously across the album. No, Crockett didn’t set out to write a themed record. Or, through his studied eye, to find America. But with $10 Cowboy, he might have done both.

Happy 20th birthday to ‘Family Album’, the third recording of Faun Fables and the first one released on Drag City.

These songs belong to sons and daughters, entwined and orphaned, domesticated and feral; to all the family vines unravelling from a ball of yarn.

In this family album, runaways graze the wild together, a mother finds her courage playing the piano, dogs become thieves and wolves, and a son is taken too soon. Fourteen-year-old nymphs sit dangerously at the crossroads, a younger brother tries to find his place, packs of girls defeat fear with a march, and the nightly adventures of the household mouse are spied upon.

Dawn McCarthy’s creative background was forged in oral tradition amidst a large musical family in Spokane, Washington; studying piano, music theatre, rock bands, guitar, folklore and ethnomusicology. Dawn cut her teeth as a singer and performer with various bands and cabarets in Madison, Wisconsin and New York City, most notably as yodeller with the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, who inspired her to want a gypsy life with a kindred spirit someday. Her focus took a pivotal turn in that direction in 1997 with a solo quest through the UK and Ireland and their bardic traditions; singing songs in clubs and homes, all the while undergoing a pastoral, psychological experience with the land. Upon her return to the States, a fateful meeting with Oakland, CA born-and-raised Nils Frykdahl (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) moved McCarthy back to the West to begin a new creative collaboration in the thriving hills and art community of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Since 1999, Faun Fables have released six albums and performed their animist, otherworldly folk music across North America and Europe, with shows in Australia, New Zealand and Israel, as well. Dawn’s writing and voice (described by The New Yorker as “one of the more compelling instruments in contemporary music”) opens hearts and minds with a whisper to a rallying battle cry, further animated by Frykdahl’s adventurous musicality and vocals.
Dawn has written musical theatre performed by the Idyllwild Arts Academy, among others, and has lent her vocals to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy on ‘The Letting Go’ and ‘What the Brothers Sang’. In 2022, Faun Fables debuted their family band, joined onstage by their daughters with vocals, percussion, keyboard and dance.

TRACK LISTING

1. Eyes Of A Bird
2. Poem, No. 2
3. A Mother
4. And A Piano
5. Lucy Belle
6. Joshua
7. Nop Of Time
8. Still Here
9. Preview
10. Higher
11. Carousel With
12. Madonnas
13. Rising Din
14. Fear March
15. Eternal
16. Mouse Song
17. Old And Light

‘Mother Twilight’ is the second Faun Fables album. It has since been noted by Scottish author R.J. Stewart as a work containing true artifacts of the oral underworld tradition. Dawn and Nils made a handassembled first pressing and peddled it to nearly every bar and rural hall across North America from 2001 to 2003. Drag City reissued the CD in 2004.

Things are glowing outside, enough to bring any sun worshiper in for the night. But you must remain outside and begin walking. It’ll prepare you for the night, which otherwise comes as a chilling surprise. If you pay attention this time, maybe you’ll understand why you’re becoming invisible. When your memory began, it wasn’t startling, wasn’t a mistake. It came out of an old, dark and familiar thing, like a storyteller, like Twilight… so save us from fear, mother, and tell your story.

Dawn McCarthy’s creative background was forged in oral tradition amidst a large musical family in Spokane, Washington; studying piano, music theatre, rock bands, guitar, folklore and ethnomusicology. Dawn cut her teeth as a singer and performer with various bands and cabarets in Madison, Wisconsin and New York City, most notably as yodeller with the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, who inspired her to want a gypsy life with a kindred spirit someday. Her focus took a pivotal turn in that direction in 1997 with a solo quest through the UK and Ireland and their bardic traditions; singing songs in clubs and homes, all the while undergoing a pastoral, psychological experience with the land. Upon her return to the States, a fateful meeting with Oakland, CA born-and-raised Nils Frykdahl (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) moved McCarthy back to the West to begin a new creative collaboration in the thriving hills and art community of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Since 1999, Faun Fables have released six albums and performed their animist, otherworldly folk music across North America and Europe, with shows in Australia, New Zealand and Israel, as well. Dawn’s writing and voice (described by The New Yorker as “one of the more compelling instruments in contemporary music”) opens hearts and minds with a whisper to a rallying battle cry, further animated by Frykdahl’s adventurous musicality and vocals.

Dawn has written musical theatre performed by the Idyllwild Arts Academy, among others, and has lent her vocals to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy on ‘The Letting Go’ and ‘What the Brothers Sang’. In 2022, Faun Fables debuted their family band, joined onstage by their daughters with vocals, percussion, keyboard and dance.

TRACK LISTING

1. Begin
2. Sleepwalker
3. Shadowsound
4. Hela
5. Traveller
6. Returning
7. Train
8. Beautiful Blade
9. Mother Twilight
10. Lightning Rods
11. Moth
12. Girl That
13. Said Goodbye
14. Washington State
15. Catch Me
16. Live Old

Following their critically acclaimed 2019 debut album Unfurl, Hidden Notes Records are happy to announce the release of the multi-award-nominated experimental/contemporary folk string duo Fran & Flora’s sophomore full-length album, Precious Collection.

Released on Friday 12th April 2024, this album, produced by the duo themselves, explodes in myriad directions expressing the richness of the long-standing collaboration between Francesca Ter-Berg (cello/vocals/electronics) and Flora Curzon (violin/vocals/electronics). With Klezmer and Yiddish song as the predominant inspiration for the record, Precious Collection defies convention, featuring self-penned tunes and unique arrangements pushing their ground-breaking project beyond their virtuosic string playing. Drummers Ursula Russell (Snapped Ankles, Alabaster DePlume) and Simon Roth (Chris Potter, Alice Zawadzki, Adrian Dunbar) feature on the record on full kit and Ukrainian Poik (marching drum) respectively, and Francesca and Flora experiment with bowed cymbals, extended piano techniques, and samples of found sounds.The album was recorded in three different locations - Total Refreshment Centre (London), Big Jelly Studios (Ramsgate) and Great North Sound Society (Maine, USA).

The music of Fran & Flora sits in two camps, both steeped in tradition, with material drawn directly from archival recordings, recovered manuscripts and years of study with traditional music masters, whilst simultaneously garnering a contemporary and avant-garde aesthetic, speaking to the more classical and experimental listener. Fran & Flora inject their source material with drones, loops, free improvisation and electronics to create a ‘border-defying’ (Mojo) sound. Their influences range across a wide spectrum of artists and composers from Silver Mt.Zion to Rhiannon Giddens, Lankum, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Colin Stetson, Adrienne Lenker, Shabaka Hutchings and Mica Levi.

TRACK LISTING

1. Nudity
2. Romanian Fantasies II
3. New Beginnings
4. Fishelekh Gefinen - To Catch A Fish
5. Nign
6. Dobriden-Hamanul
7. Kick Up In 9
8. Feygele - Little Bird
9. Flowers For Innocence
10. Yikhes - Lineage (Donia IV)
11. Hold Me Close
12. Sholem Aleichem 

‘The Water is the Shovel of the Shore’ is the revelatory new release by the nine-piece contemporary folk group Shovel Dance Collective, an expansive ensemble of multi-disciplinary artists and musicians currently based in London. Comprising members of caroline, Gentle Stranger, as well as accomplished visual artists and solo instrumentalists, Shovel Dance Collective reconceive traditional folk music as an experimental mode of longform composition, encompassing drone, early music, free improvisation, and metal. In the performances and recordings of the collective, the arrangements and lyricism of the folk canon are reinvented, as historically disenfranchised perspectives are placed at the forefront. Predicated on recounts of queer experience, black consciousness, pioneering feminist ideals, and the labour of the working class, the output of Shovel Dance Collective represents an inclusive repository of subversive oral folklore. With their third release ‘The Water is the Shovel of the Shore’ the collective explore the myriad experiential and symbolic resonances that water has for working people, focusing on the essence and significance of the river Thames. Across stark, profound adaptations of fabled balladry, elegiac sea shanties, graceful jigs and impassioned, unadorned vocal airs, Shovel Dance Collective deliver an innovative, stirring exposition of poignant folksong threaded through with site-specific field recordings. Songs of English, Irish, Scottish & Guyanese origin, documented by the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Cecil Sharp, A.L. Lloyd & Wordsworth McAndrew, reflect an international, anti-colonial ethos and chronicle enduring tales of proletarian life. Embedded within an immersive sound collage, incorporating environmental recordings captured along the Thames, in churches and cathedrals, as well as in the midst of liminal urban surroundings, the evocative songcraft of Shovel Dance Collective constitutes an authentic, powerful embodiment of visionary modern folk music, rooted in ancestral homage, restitution, timeless communion and collective solidarity. 

TRACK LISTING

1) I
2) II
3) III
4) IV

With Time is Glass, Six Organs of Admittance is captured once again in the intricate tangle of the fretboards, soaring in open skies above. Like lens flare cutting through the speakers; spiderwebs cracking the windshield that holds back all the onrushing reality. Blowing the dust away, cutting a new path for cognition. As is always endeavored.... After 20 years of living on the road in different places, Six Organs of Admittance had returned home to Humboldt County — a far country, to some, but still part of the world through which creatures of all kinds are moving through and contributing to. And some of them are human. Alone together — forming connection and exchange out of thought and expression — no different from the people on the other side of the Redwood Curtain. It was there, where Six Organs had long ago emerged, in the name of everything cycling, of circles that spiral concentrically and remain unbroken, the new music was conceived.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A startlingly focused and beautifully minimalistic recording of voice and guitar, showing the perfect juxtaposition of rhythmic guitar playing and soaring, swooning vocal work from Ben Chasny. An unhindered, unhurried gem.

TRACK LISTING

The Mission
Hephaestus
Slip Away
Pilar
Theophany Song
My Familiar
Spinning In A River
Summer’s Last Rays
New Year’s Song

‘Willson Williams’ witnesses the meeting of two likeminded musicians who’ve built their successful, independent careers on inventive folk instrumentation, reflective and sincere lyricism, and not a small amount of self-deprecation. Their modest confessionals, written poetically and over nostalgic and atmospheric melodies, are as relatable as ever, and together they find new ways to unpack their feelings.  

One overarching theme on the album is that of grief, when the writing process saw them both, tragically, in mourning for separate loved ones; Dan for his brother Karl and his friend Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit, and Kathryn for her friend, comedian and BBC Radio 4 presenter Jeremy Hardy. They explain that “the initial premise and starting point for us was discussions and open conversations on bereavement. We’d both recently lost friends who were also in the public eye, and we talked about the strange place between personal loss and the communal grieving of a public figure”. Contrastingly, the music on ‘Willson Williams’ is warm, heartfelt and even cheerful, an opposing nature that is completely in keeping with both their humour and candidness.

TRACK LISTING

1. Arrow
2. Grace
3. R U 4 Real
4. Our Best
5. Shelf
6. Wish
7. Sweetest Wine
8. Weekend
9. Sing Out
10. Elvis
11. Big Nothing