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RICHARD SWIFT

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Richard Swift

KFC / A Man's Man

Secretly Canadian

Written in the wee hours of the night, the late Richard Swift’s ‘KFC’ is a winding sardonic monologue about a rough night of food poisoning following a quick dinner of fried chicken.

On the track, Swift’s vocal is pitched down and distorted while accompanied by cooing vocal harmonies and drums.

TRACK LISTING

KFC
A Man’s Man

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Richard Swift

Even Your Drums Will Die: Live At Pendarvis Farm 2011

Secretly Canadian

Recorded in 2011 in a dusty, beloved barn, ‘Even Your Drums Will Die’ is a time machine, a real one, to a moment packed thick with Richard Swift’s singular, crackling liveliness. Where Swift’s studio recordings are marked by texture, tone and mood, ‘Even Your Drums Will Die’ puts a spotlight on Swift’s voice, his lyrics and his songwriting.

Running through all of Swift’s tunes is a certain agitation - a fidgetiness, a restlessness. It’s clearer than ever now, over two years after Swift’s passing, that he used his music to let a little pressure out of his tire. ‘A Song for Milton Feher’ nods to all this, its namesake coming from the professional dancer and director who taught his students to release their “habits of tension.” The song feels like a skeleton key to Swift’s oeuvre, a clear look into the wild wheels spinning inside his big old artist noggin.

On the flipside is ‘Lady Luck’. The classic. The revived ghost of a lost 45 that never existed, or maybe always did, but that only Richard Swift could make real.

If you know these songs, you will find them set alight here. If you don’t, ‘Even Your Drums Will Die’ is an incomparable snapshot of both art and artist. It is a genie, a real one, let loose from the lamp with Richard Swift’s explosive energy, imagination and mischief.

Recorded Live at Pickathon, 2011.

Swift was a celebrated recording artist, collaborator (The Black Keys, The Shins, the Arcs) and producer (Nathaniel Rateliff, Kevin Morby, Guster, Pretenders).

TRACK LISTING

The Ballad Of You Know Who
The Novelist
Looking Back, I Should Have Been Home
The Million Dollar Baby
The Songs Of National Freedom
The Original Thought
The Ballad Of Old What’s His Name
The First Time
A Song For Milton Feher
Lady Luck

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Richard Swift

The Atlantic Ocean

Secretly Canadian

Meticulously arranged and gorgeously recorded (including a session at Chicago’s famed Wilco Loft), ‘Atlantic Ocean’ is an immaculate kiss off. It’s a cheeky - if not wholly acrimonious - takedown of music industry artifice and hipster culture vapidity. “I’m part of the scene… I got the right LPs,” Swift begins the album on the title track over fuzzed Casio stabs and a clunky, bounding drum machine. The chorus of “Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, You’re gonna drown, drown drown” is itself a wee stab at a major label of a similar name. Across the entire album, Swift is burning bridges and the exposing trolls underneath. As the timeless Sly Stone-leaning burner ‘Lady Luck’ stretches to its climax, you get the sense that Swift has put his faith and trust into the familial love around him and not in the dangling carrot of music. Alongside 2007’s ‘Dressed Up For The Letdown’ and 2018’s posthumous ‘The Hex’, Richard Swift’s ‘The Atlantic Ocean’ (2009) completes his triumvirate of meta-pop masterpieces.

TRACK LISTING

The Atlantic Ocean
The Original Thought
Ballad Of Old What’s His Name
R.I.P.
Already Gone
Hallelujah, Goodnight!
The First Time
Bat Coma Motown
The End Of An Age
A Song For Milton Feher
Lady Luck

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Richard Swift

Ground Trouble Jaw / Walt Wolfman - Reissue

Secretly Canadian

It was a great Swiftian irony that the shining moment of realization that is ‘Ground Trouble Jaw’ first saw its release as a modest, digital-only EP in 2008. Here Secretly Canadian right that wrong and pair it with 2011’s ‘Walt Wolfman’ EP, very much a spiritual twin of ‘Ground Trouble Jaw’. Walt Wolfman’’s blown-out, basement R&B speaker-shredders are not for the faint of heart. Highlight of the set, ‘MG 33’ is a raw and ghostly trance, a blast of kinetic energy and that jazz apple smoke blown right in your face. The quasi-title track ‘Walt Whitman’ is a cryptic salute to Whitman, whose American lineage of primal, urgent art can be traced to include Kerouac and Ray Johnson, Bo Diddley and Beefheart - right on through to Swift himself. He was an outsiderpop wanderkind who could do more with one worn, old mic than most men could with a high-end studio, taking ‘the holy moment’ and making it eternal.

TRACK LISTING

Would You
Lady Luck
The Bully
The Original Thought
A Song For Milton
Feher Whitman
MG 333
Laugh It Up
Zombie Boogie
Out & About
Drakula (Hey Man!)
St. Michael

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Richard Swift

Dressed Up For The Letdown - Reissue

Secretly Canadian

Richard Swift confidently composed yet another original masterpiece; employing an archaic attitude of tempered restraint on a fresh collection of ten songs, without appearing shamelessly retro or kitschy. Playing a vast majority of the instruments himself, by virtue Swift has created something that is characteristically his. And considering his rough-around-the edges exterior, one could rightly assume that Swift desires the listener to accept him as an ordinary honest man with some honest songs - unmasked blemishes and all. Yet when one engages with Swift on this narrow-road-less-travelled, one immediately ignores the subtle imperfections shadowed by the all-consuming white light of well-crafted pop songs in an analogue heaven.

TRACK LISTING

Dressed Up For The Letdown
The Songs Of National Freedom
Most Of What I Know
Buildings In America
Artist & Repertoire
Kisses For The Misses
P.S. It All Falls Down
Ballad Of You Know Who
The Million Dollar Baby
The Opening Band

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Richard Swift

The Hex

Secretly Canadian

LP

£18.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days

Cat Number

SC242LP

Release date

7 Dec '18

Includes MP3 Download Code.

Richard Swift believed in and sought real beauty. And so, even at its most caustic and sardonic, his masterpiece swan song The Hex is beautiful. Conceived in pieces over the last several years and completed just the month before his passing, The Hex is the grand statement Swift acolytes have been a-wishin-and-a-hopin’ for all these years. After a career of sticking some of his finest songs on EPs and 45s, here are all his powers coalescing into a single, long-player statement. At its core, The Hex is an aching call out into the void for Swift’s mother (“Wendy”) and his sister (“Sister Song”) whom he lost in back-to-back years. You hear a man at his lowest and spiritually on his heels.

The pain fueling Swift’s cries of “She’s never comin’ back” on the absolutely gutting standout “Nancy” is some sort of dark catharsis for anyone who’s ever lost a loved one to the cold abstraction of Death. Over a slow, Wall of Sound kick and a warbling synth, Swift’s cries climb higher-n-higher-n-higher into what may be his most devastating vocal performance on record. A cry of pain so real and so raw Swift had to treat the performance with just a little studio effect, without which the recorded grieving might be too much to bear. The Hex is presented here as “The Hex For Family and Friends.” An obsessive fan of Wall of Sound doo-wop, early Funkadelic, Bo Diddley, Beefheart and Link Wray, Swift gives them all a moment with the flashlight around The Hex campfire, one moment to make a strange shadow-cast face for us, his family and friends.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A visceral but fascinating look into the mind of one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century, 'The Hex' is disarming at points, but dynamically absorbing and brilliantly written. A superb legacy, and a superb listen throughout.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Hex
2. Broken Finger Blues
3. Selfishmath
4. Dirty Jim
5. Babylon
6. Wendy
7. Sister Song
8. Nancy
9. HZLWD
10. Kensington!
11. Sept20

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Richard Swift

The Novelist / Walking Without Effort

Secretly Canadian

2xLP

£19.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days

Cat Number

SC111LP

Release date

7 Dec '18 (originally released 29 May '06)

Includes MP3 Download Code.

"The Novelist" - Swift's highly acclaimed, succinct, eight song, nineteen minute and 38 second-long, audiophile archivist experiment - immediately ushers the listener deep into the recesses of Swift's creative core for a kaleidoscopic trip aboard an intergalactic vaudevillian steamship with a speakeasy code-word. Yet, "The Novelist" is only one small manifestation of Swift's entire musical manifesto and only one-half of this double-disc set. "Walking Without Effort" - the second disc in the two-disc set - is the first, and perhaps most deceptively complex, yet decisively understated, Swift release to date. A slight step eastward from the eclectic musings of "The Novelist", "Walking Without Effort" intentionally paints another image, and baptizes believers born-again into Swift's unique brand of sonic schizophrenia. Gramophones are replaced by 8-tracks and Persian rugs are covered with shag, as Swift nods to the early 70s solo efforts of McCartney and Harrison, while waving to Burt Bacharach and Van Dyke Parks.

TRACK LISTING

Foreward
Lady Day
Lovely Night
Sadsong St.
Blues For Mother
The Novelist
Ballad Of Clifford Swift
Looking Back, I Should
Have Been Home More
Walking Without Effort
Theme
Half Lit
In The Air
As I Go
Above & Beneath
Mexico (1977)
Losing Sleep
Not Wasting Time
Beautifulheart

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Damien Jurado & Richard Swift

Other People's Songs Volume One

Secretly Canadian

Over the weekend of August 21-22, 2010, not long after Damien Jurado and Richard Swift first collaborated to produce Damien’s 2010 record, ‘Saint Bartlett’, the pair hunkered down with a 4- track recorder and one Coles 4038 ribbon microphone to record a collection of cover songs that run the gamut from John Denver to Chubby Checker to Kraftwerk.

The timing was perfect. On ‘Other People’s Songs Volume One’ one can see the scaffolding of what would become a creative turning point for the pair - later seen with the release of Damien Jurado’s ‘Maraqopa’, the first record in his Maraqopa trilogy - less than two years later. The opening drum hits of ‘Be Not So Fearful’, the falsetto vocals of ‘Sweetness’ and the Spaghetti-Western swing of ‘Radioactivity’ are, by now, hallmarks of the Jurado / Swift sound but ‘Other People’s Songs Volume One’ is a transitional fossil, a marking of the pair’s collaborative evolution.

This is the first time ‘Other People’s Songs Volume One’ is available on CD and LP.

TRACK LISTING

Be Not So Fearful
Hello Sunshine
Sweetness
Sincere Replies
If The Sun Stops Shinin’
Follow Me
Outside MyWindow
Radioactivity
Crazy Like A Fox

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Richard Swift

Richard Swift As Onassis

Secretly Canadian

Richard Swift is one of the most critically acclaimed artists of the last few years. On this new double album he turns his hand to a completely different genre and mood: a 20 song exploration into Richard Swift's alter ego; delivering acid garage rock classics. This was recorded on down time between tours – a chance for Richard to delve into his hugely varied musical collection. Drawing on Link Wray, Howlin' Wolf, Little Richard and others, this is an album drenched in classic reverb and knee-high boogie blues.

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