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WRECKLESS ERIC

Wreckless Eric

Leisure Land

    As Wreckless Eric he needs little introduction - he wrote and recorded the classic Whole Wide World and had a hit with it back in 1977. Since then it's been a hit for countless other artists including The Monkees, Cage The Elephant and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. Eric’s version featured in the 2022 Expedia / Superbowl / Ewan MacGregor travel ad, and the Cage The Elephant version is the new theme tune for the podcast Smartless.

    As Eric Goulden it's a little more complicated - a musician, artist, writer, recording engineer and producer, he didn’t like either the music business, the mechanics of fame, or the name he’d been given to hide behind, so he crawled out of the spotlight and disappeared into the underground. He went on to release twenty something albums in forty something years under various names - The Len Bright Combo, Le Beat Group Electrique, The Donovan Of Trash, The Hitsville House Band, and with his wife as one half of Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby, finally realising he was stuck with the name Wreckless Eric.

    Eric’s three most recent albums ‘amERICa’, Construction Time & Demolition and Transience are widely praised as his best work. His albums encapsulate pop, bubblegum, garage trash and psychedelia - lyrical and sonic journeys, pop explosions, epic voyages, Polaroid snapshots.

    This new album, Leisureland, marks a return to his more ramshackle world of recording - guitars and temperamentally unpredictable analogue keyboards, beat-boxes and loops in conjunction with a real drummer, Sam Shepherd, who he met in a local coffee shop in Catskill, New York. He was delighted to find that Sam lived around the corner and could easily drop by to put drums on newly recorded tracks. The recording methodology may have been Contemporary American but the subject matter is almost entirely British. It also contains more instrumentals than any of his previous albums.

    'The achievement for Wreckless Eric is to have made new music that connects to old music without maudlin nostalgia or huffy defensiveness, refusing to let age dim the passion for the music that means the most to him. In other words, he rocks' - Ken Tucker - FRESH AIR / NPR

    'burns like a lost Crazy Horse classic' - Ben Graham - SHINDIG!

    'a scarily powerful and forward-moving musical threat' - David Quantick - MOJO MAGAZINE

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Southern Rock
    2. Inside The Majestic
    3. Badhat Town
    4. Intermission
    5. Standing Water
    6. Standing Sunday Morning
    7. The Old Versailles
    8. Dial Painters (Radium Girls)
    9. The Tipping Point
    10. High Seas (Won & Lost)
    11. On The Move
    12. Esplanade By Moonlight
    13. They Come Free With Cornflakes

    14. Zoom (Glittering In The Sun)

    15. Drag Time

    Wreckless Eric

    Leisureland

      As Wreckless Eric he needs little introduction – he wrote and recorded the classic Whole Wide World and had a hit with it back in 1977. Since then it's been a hit for countless other artists including The Monkees, Cage The Elephant and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. Eric’s version featured in the 2022 Expedia / Superbowl / Ewan MacGregor travel ad, and the Cage The Elephant version is the new theme tune for the podcast Smartless.

      As Eric Goulden it's a little more complicated – a musician, artist, writer, recording engineer and producer, he didn’t like either the music business, the mechanics of fame, or the name he’d been given to hide behind, so he crawled out of the spotlight and disappeared into the underground. He went on to release twenty something albums in forty something years under various names – The Len Bright Combo, Le Beat Group Electrique, The Donovan Of Trash, The Hitsville House Band, and with his wife as one half of Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby, finally realising he was stuck with the name Wreckless Eric.

      Eric’s three most recent albums ‘amERICa’, Construction Time & Demolition and Transience are widely praised as his best work. His albums encapsulate pop, bubblegum, garage trash and psychedelia – lyrical and sonic journeys, pop explosions, epic voyages, Polaroid snapshots.

      This new album, Leisureland, marks a return to his more ramshackle world of recording – guitars and temperamentally unpredictable analogue keyboards, beat-boxes and loops in conjunction with a real drummer, Sam Shepherd, who he met in a local coffee shop in Catskill, New York. He was delighted to find that Sam lived around the corner and could easily drop by to put drums on newly recorded tracks. The recording methodology may have been Contemporary American but the subject matter is almost entirely British. It also contains more instrumentals than any of his previous albums.

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Southern Rock
      2. Inside The Majestic
      3. Badhat Town
      4. Intermission
      5. Standing Water
      6. Standing Sunday Morning
      7. The Old Versailles
      8. Dial Painters (Radium Girls)
      9. The Tipping Point
      10. High Seas (Won & Lost)
      11. On The Move
      12. Esplanade By Moonlight
      13. They Come Free With Cornflakes
      14. Zoom (Glittering In The Sun)
      15. Drag Time

      Wreckless Eric

      Transience

        Eric Goulden, the man everyone knows as Wreckless Eric, is a rare example of an older and established artist who hasn't lapsed into comfortable formulas. Exactly a year after his last album, the well-received Construction Time & Demolition, he's back with a new album, Transience. For every song of Wreckless Eric's you remember from his early days on Stiff Records, he's recorded 10 more that you've probably never heard. The early DIY British indie label may have been his entry-level position into the music business, but Eric Goulden didn't stop making music after the novelty of Stiff Records - and his being known as Wreckless Eric - wore off. Forty years on, Goulden is still making insightful music while the original label is but a footnote in music history.

        On Transience, Eric is joined by friends including acoustic 12-string guitar player Alexander Turnquist, Cheap Trick bassist, Tom Petersson, Amy Rigby on piano and backing vocals, jazz horn player Artie Barbato, and on drums Steve Goulding, late of Graham Parker & the Rumour - the first time he and Eric have recorded together since Eric's enduring hit "Whole Wide World" back in 1976.

        He wrote the songs on the move, alone in grubby rooms, in dilapidated motels, and 'poolside' at rundown, out-of-season resort hotels, during gaps between tour dates. And in roadside cafes, parking lots and launderettes. "I was seeing stuff and writing it down, little vignettes. I felt like I was in a succession of Raymond Carver short stories."

        Early on in his career, Eric said that all he wanted to leave behind was an indelible stain. During last year's gruelling tour schedule, Eric lost his mother and also his ex, the mother of his daughter. "You start to think, that's it I'm next. There's more time elapsed than there is time left to go. It's like the school summer holiday when I was a kid - at the start it stretched away endlessly but suddenly there was only a week left and then it was over. We're all going to die, it's inevitable and unavoidable. As this vague concept becomes more than just a disquieting reality, I get preoccupied with what is and what might have been."

        The sun goes down and California slides majestically into the ocean. Eric grinds the hell out of a cheap electric guitar.

        TRACK LISTING

        1.Father To The Man
        2.Strange Locomotion
        3.The Half Of It
        4.Dead End
        5.Creepy People (In The Middle Of The Night)
        6.Tiny House
        7.Indelible Stain
        8.California / Handyman

        Wreckless Eric

        Construction Time & Demolition

          Wreckless Eric is Eric Goulden. His recording career began in 1977 when he was little more than an ex-teenage art student with the enduring Whole Wide World (recently a Billboard chart hit all over again for the US band Cage The Elephant). His new album is the culmination of over forty years of touring and recording - a life of hardship, creativity and getting away with it. Loud, dissonant, lyrical, sometimes gently melodic, Construction Time & Demolition is cogent music for desperate times.


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