JOSH T. PEARSON has unveiled a new track from his forthcoming album,
The Straight Hits!, out
April 13 on
Mute. Listen to “
Straight At Me”
here.
Preorder
The Straight Hits! here.
Josh T. Pearson and his band, which features Lift To Experience drummer Andy Young and members of the Texas Gentlemen, take to the road with a tour across Europe in May and June, with the final date of the UK tour at
London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire on
May 22. Ahead of that, Josh T. Pearson will head to Austin’s SXSW festival in March for a series of dates. Full details below.
Tickets on sale now Though he’s been a recording artist for over two decades now, and has been writing songs for thirty years,
The Straight Hits! is only Josh T. Pearson’s second solo album and follows his acclaimed debut, 2011’s
Last Of The Country Gentlemen and 2001’s
The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads by Lift To Experience.
Lately, the dapper Texan gentleman has been motivated by a desire to share more Josh T. Pearson music with the world, before it’s too late.
“In the last years I learned to dance, take drugs, make love… choose life. I got rid of the beard, cut my hair and started wearing colour. I burned down all my idols and realized in the process that I needed to burn down my reputation as fast as I could too. I felt constricted by the old stuff and I didn’t like being in a cage. It wasn’t letting me move on.”“I was at the US Embassy in London when the shit went down with the presidential election in 2016,” he remembers.
“It was unsettling; I’ve never seen the country so divided. A responsibility seemed to shift within me – like, where are the people really stepping up to spread joy?”It is in this spirit that Mr. Josh T. Pearson presents
The Straight Hits!, an album which began as a mere creative exercise - each song had to follow certain parameters, listed below as The Five Pillars - and one that has given Pearson the freedom to write a lighter, more “straight” album, described by
Uncut as demonstrating
“a sense of well being and a lightness of spirit”. The Straight Hits! features multiple different flavors of country, rock and all points in between, taking in blasts of goofy shit-kicking country-punk (opener “Straight To The Top!”), cataclysmic rock’n’roll playing its romantic drama at high-stakes (“Loved Straight To Hell,” which compresses the elemental power of Lift To Experience into five and a half minutes of symphonic turmoil); aching folksy mourn (“Dire Straights Of Love”), and even a bona fide love song, the deliciously profound ache of “A Love Song (Set Me Straight),” which Pearson admits breaks several of the Five Pillars, but obeys an unwritten Sixth Pillar: Musical rules are made to be broken.
Written in three days, the tracks were cut with similar no-nonsense focus, in three days with engineer Matt Pence (who made Mute’s 2017 reissue of
The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads sound so vivid) at the controls, Lift To Experience drummer Andy Young once again manning the traps, and Daniel Creamer and Scott Lee Jr. of The Texas Gentlemen on keyboards and bass guitar. The recordings were then flown to the UK to be mixed by Ben Hillier. And while the whole project was meant as a simple “exercise,” the result is some of Pearson’s finest music.
Josh T. Pearson has freed himself from the mythology that has surrounded him since Lift To Experience’s implosion, his subsequent years in the wilderness travelling throughout Europe and beyond, and the release of his acclaimed debut album.
There’s new Josh T. Pearson music in the world, and it’s joyful, giddy, life-affirming stuff.
JOSH T. PEARSON 2018 TOUR March 12 – Austin, TX – SXSW Discover Denton Texas Music Showcase - 1am (Sidewinder Inside)
March 13 – Austin, TX – SXSW w/ Low - 9pm (St. David’s Historic Sanctuary)
March 14 – Austin, TX – SXSW SX San Jose - 4pm (Hotel San Jose)
March 15 – Austin, TX – SXSW Tiger Bomb Promo Official SXSW Showcase - 1am (Valhalla)
April 13 – London, England – Rough Trade West (instore + signing, from 2pm)
April 13 – London, England – Rough Trade East (instore + signing, from 7pm)
April 14 – Bristol, England – Rough Trade (instore + signing, from 6.30pm)
April 15 – Nottingham, England – Rough Trade (instore + signing, from 5.30pm)
May 15 – Leeds, England – Brudenell Social Club
May 16 – Birmingham, England – The Glee Club
May 18 – Dublin, Ireland – Whelans
May 19 – Glasgow, Scotland – Art School
May 20 – Manchester, England – Gorilla
May 22 – London, England – Shepherd’s Bush Empire
May 24 – Paris, France – La Maroquinerie
May 26 – Brussels, Belgium – Rotonde Botanique
May 27 – Amsterdam, Netherlands – Bitterzoet
May 28 – Cologne, Germany – Gebäude 9
May 29 – Hamburg, Germany – Knust
May 30 – Berlin, Germany – Quasimodo
June 4 – Stockholm, Sweden – Kagelbanen
June 5 – Copenhagen, Denmark – DR Koncerthuset Studio 3
June 6 – Oslo, Norway – Parkteatret
Josh T. Pearson’s The Five Pillars: 1) All songs must have a verse, a chorus and a bridge.
2) The lyrics must run 16 lines or less.
3) They must have the word “straight” in the title.
4) That title must be four words or less.
5) They must submit to song above all else. (“You do as she tells you, whatever the song tells you,” Pearson explains. “You bend to her, and not her to you.”).
JOSH T. PEARSON: FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | SPOTIFY | APPLE MUSIC
0 comments:
Post a Comment