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Have you ever gone back and watched a movie from your childhood as an adult and been walloped in the face with the realization that it crafted a huge chunk of your personality? I hope so, because that will make what I’m about to say next make much more sense: I watched The Great Muppet Caper on Disney+ recently and, hoo boy, was that an eye-opener for the grown-up version of me. My whole life, I have loved heist movies and weirdo absurd comedies. The Great Muppet Caper is both of those things, somehow. There’s a chicken-or-the-egg situation at play here, sure. Did I love this movie because I’ve always been wired this way? Or did watching this movie dozens of times in my formative years alter my wiring? It’s a fair question. A complex one. One I have no interest in examining more deeply. Let’s move on!

Watching it now, it’s kind of incredible it even exists. Like, I’m not entirely sure who the movie was supposed to be for? It’s a children’s movie filled with characters breaking the fourth wall more often than Fleabag. It’s got huge runs of nonsense jokes that would fit in nicely on the strangest Adult Swim creations you can imagine. There’s barely a plot, and what small amount of plot there is serves mostly as a delivery system for more nonsense jokes. I’ve been thinking about all of it a lot since I watched it again, and the best answer I’ve come up with is this: The movie was made specifically for me to enjoy at any age of my life. I feel great about it.

The time has come to talk about The Great Muppet Caper.

1. The plot of The Great Muppet Caper goes something like this: Kermit and Fozzie play newspaper reporters who travel to London with their trusted photographer, Gonzo, to investigate a string of jewel robberies perpetrated by Nicky Holiday (Charles Grodin), who a) is the sleazy playboy brother of London fashion icon Lady Holiday (Diana Rigg); b) frames Miss Piggy for the crimes; and c) plans to steal his sister’s most valuable possession, a baseball-sized diamond called “The Baseball Diamond,” with the assistance of three fashion models in trench coats. I would challenge you to find a better plot for any movie, ever, but we have entirely too much to get to for me to send you on a wild goose chase. Let’s just go ahead and agree that there isn’t one.

2. “But how,” you ask, “do three Muppets become newspaper reporters who fly to London to investigate a string of jewel robberies?” Excellent question. Allow me to present an incomplete list of things that happen in the first 15 minutes of the movie:

• Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo ride in a hot air balloon during the opening credits, which they comment on as the credits appear on the screen, marking the first of many, many times characters in the movie absolutely obliterate the fourth wall
• There is a huge musical number titled “Hey, A Movie,” in which various Muppets dance through the streets and explain the plot of the film you are about to watch, and which ends with the first robbery of Lady Holiday’s jewels
• Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo are called to their editor’s office, where they are fired for missing the huge robbery story entirely and instead running a large photo of themselves on the front page under the headline “Identical Twins Join Chronicle Staff”
• They fly to London on their own dime in the luggage area of an airplane and are heaved out an open door over England, where they safely crash land in a pond

Perhaps you noticed something odd in those bullet points. Perhaps it was the phrase “identical twins.” This was not a mistake on my part. In The Great Muppet Caper, Kermit (a frog) and Fozzy (a bear) play identical twin brothers. Here, look:

It makes no sense, in any way. I could not possibly love it more.

3. This gets us to an important point, one I touched on in the introduction: This movie is powerfully weird, bordering on absurd. Again, Kermit and Fozzie play twins. Nicky and Lady Holiday are siblings, but Nicky has an American accent and his sister has the most British accent you’ve ever heard. Characters are constantly commenting on the fact that they’re in a movie. Kermit prepares for a date with Miss Piggy by shaving, despite the fact that he is a frog puppet who does not have whiskers. At one point, Kermit and Miss Piggy stop an important scene right in the middle to discuss whether Miss Piggy is over-acting. Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo stay in a dilapidated glorified hostel called The Happiness Hotel, and the cab driver who takes them there, Beauregard, asks them what room they are staying in, and when they say they’re on the second floor, he replies “Oh, I’m sorry. I can only take you as far as the lobby” before crashing through the front door.

At another point, Miss Piggy is thrust into the role of runway model at Lady Holiday’s big fashion show and proceeds to have a full-on musical daydream that features an extended synchronized swimming performance. Yes, Miss Piggy swims. Underwater. It is not the most impressive and confusing thing a Muppet does in this movie. We’ll get to that. But first, proof.

The Muppets are chaotic and good.

4. The Great Muppet Caper is, in many ways, a showcase for Miss Piggy. She shows up at Lady Holiday’s door with dreams of becoming a model, gets hired as an assistant, and within moments finds herself in a mistaken identity ruse of her own creation that starts with Kermit thinking she is Lady Holiday, features her falling butt-first into a trash can, and ends with her agreeing to let him pick her up for a date at a house that does not belong to her. Later in the movie, after she’s been framed for the jewel theft, she breaks out of prison by pulling the bars apart with her bare hands. She also does this thing where she kind of bounces when she gets excited. All of the Muppets do this, technically, but none of them do it better.

5. Speaking of things that no one does better, I promise all of you that you have never seen anyone enjoy playing a lecherous sleaze more than Charles Grodin does in this movie. As much as? Maybe. Possibly. But not more. He looks like he’s having so much fun. It reminds me a lot of Hugh Grant’s performance in Paddington 2, just the acknowledgment that this — playing a human villain opposite stuffed/animated beacons of light and joy — is all very silly and therefore there’s no reason to do one iota less than the absolute most in every single scene. Here is a GIF of him dancing away from a table before scurrying off. I promise you he brings this exact energy to every scene. It’s delightful.

6. The Great Muppet Caper is littered with the stupidest and most perfect little jokes you’ve ever heard. My favorite is the one where someone references catching the bad guys red-handed and another person replies “What color are his hands now?” It’s so aggressively dumb and pointless and they do it three times. They make this exact joke three times! It somehow gets funnier each time, too. It’s like the people involved are calling our bluff. Like they’re saying “Oh, you groaned at that one? Well, we’re going to keep doing it until you laugh.” This kind of commitment to a stupid bit takes courage. I’m so proud of them.

7. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present Gonzo, my favorite Muppet.

What a madman. What a lunatic. He spends this whole movie taking pictures of chickens and birds for reasons that are never explained, and launching his whole body into the street to get a taxi to stop (“It’s great when it works”), and just generally inserting anarchy into every scene. It’s one of the many reasons I enjoy A Muppet Christmas Carol so much. Whoever looked at that classic story and said “Let’s have the blue maniac narrate the whole thing in character as Charles Dickens” deserves a big smooch right on the face.

8. Okay, this is where we discuss the bicycles. Look at the Muppets riding bicycles.

This did not register for me when I was a child, but… how? Look at this. How? There is a real answer to this question that you can find with enough Googling. It involves pulleys and radio controls and a million other things that are hilariously complicated for a movie about a stuffed frog and bear thwarting a diamond heist. But my favorite answer to the question comes from the Muppet Movie director James Frawley, who also coordinated a scene with Muppets on bicycles.

Every time I show the film — whether it’s to film students at USC or UCLA or I’m going to a festival — that’s always the first question: How did Kermit ride the bicycle? And my stock answer is: I put him on a three-wheeler until he got his balance, and then I put him on the two-wheeler.

And if you really want to know more about it, if I can’t convince you to just live with the illusion that Muppets can ride bicycles through a London park while singing, then I guess I can direct you to this paragraph from a truly incredible webpage: The “Bicycles” entry on muppet dot fandom dot com.

Although marionette devices continued to be used in this sequence, the process was simplified when multiple bicycles were in the same shot. Two bicycles could be connected together with a stiff rod from axle to axle, eliminating the need to hold the bicycles up and enabling them both to be pulled from in front. In shots of the whole Muppet gang, the entire mass of bicycles — all wired together — was pulled by a fleet of over-sized tricycles and bicycles, ridden by Brian Henson and other performers. Another innovation in this sequence was the use of radio controls to move the characters’ mouths in long shots.

It’s not quite as informative as the page about Kermit and Miss Piggy’s offspring, but it’s also substantially less upsetting. A fair trade-off.

9. Cameos are littered throughout this movie, although some of them might be a little dated for anyone under 40 to catch. John Cleese plays the clueless owner of the house that Miss Piggy crashes for her date with Kermit, and it is a blast. At one point he refers to Kermit as “a lizard” and it made me think of this iconic tweet.

But the best cameo, by far, is the uncredited one by Peter Falk, Columbo himself, who slides up to Kermit on a park bench and delivers a monologue for the ages.

Again, The Great Muppet Caper is such a weird movie. I adore it in ways I will never be able to explain.

10. The ending, in brief. Kermit and the other Muppets show up at the museum to try to stop Nicky Holiday from stealing the Baseball Diamond. Their plan goes sideways in a few different ways. Things look bleak. Nicky and the models have them cornered. But then… what’s that? What’s that rumbling in the distance?

I suppose I could sit here and explain to you how exactly Miss Piggy ended up on a stunt motorcycle that crashed through a plate glass window and allowed her to disarm Charles Grodin and save the day, but, like, why? Why would I do that? Just go watch The Great Muppet Caper, again, with your jaded grown-up eyes, and marvel at the loosely-controlled absurdity of the whole experiment. It’s barely 90 minutes long. I assure you that you don’t have anything better to do.

The Joe Rogan Experience has officially launched on Spotify around the same time that the host moved to Texas. He’s got the cowboy hat to prove it, but for his first podcast on the new platform (which was recorded in Los Angeles before the move), he donned a NASA suit. His guest, comedian and podcaster Duncan Trussell, wore a silvery space suit, and the whole episode was very spacey on so many subjects. Not only that, but it was five hours long (Joe took a pee break at around the 4:38 mark), but at about 3:58, the two got serious and discussed the Black Lives Matter movement and the police killing of George Floyd.

Both Rogan and Trussell agreed that Floyd’s death was an “unforgivable” act, and but Rogan wanted to stress his believe that “we need cops, man.” While Trussell (who said that he’d received backlash for posting Black Lives Matter content on Instagram) stressed that compassion was needed in order for society to move forward, Rogan wanted to dig into what went wrong with Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin:

“Any man that would do that to another man… that man needs help. I bet he didn’t think he was gonna kill that guy, but he tortured that guy for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. That guy needs a DMT trip, he needs something, he needs to recognize who he is. I think we’re asking people to do things they’re not really qualified to do.”

Rogan doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but he does believe that people must understand that institutional change takes a lot more coordination and work than simply making a change within one’s self. Of police, Rogan offered, “They don’t have the tools to handle it. They don’t have the infrastructure to handle the load of pressure that comes in… right now, we’re so anti-cop, it’s over the top.” In response, Trussell continued to press on with the need for compassion for those who experience racism in the U.S. No easy answers shall be found, of course, but these are discussions that must be had.

In the meantime, Rogan’s followers continue to press him on social media over when he might (again) host Alex Jones, whose episodes are currently absent from Rogan’s Spotify archive. Yet Jones has claimed that he has spoken to Rogan, and there’s no reason to worry because “Joe Rogan’s favorite 100 episodes of the last 10 years or so will be left on YouTube starting December 31 when he goes exclusively to Spotify. For this couple months no man’s land the content will be on both platforms and will be migrating over.” He then added, “And so that’s why the Alex Jones interview is not there. That’s why some of the other interviews are not there.”

Yesterday, ASAP Mob founder ASAP Illz noted in his Instagram story that “Plain Jane” rapper and longtime member of ASAP Mob, ASAP Ferg, was no longer a part of the collective. “Ferg ain’t ASAP no more,” he wrote. “Sorry guys. That n**** burnt out, songs dumb trash. Mr. Anthem can’t get right.” Today, Ferg seemingly issued his response to the announcement in a rather obtuse manner. While Ferg didn’t comment directly on ASAP Illz’s comments, he did share a video that was extremely theme appropriate.

Taking a break from playing a game of pickup basketball, Ferg sat on the sidelines and played a clip from Meek Mill’s 2016 Dreams Worth More Than Money track “Cold Hearted.” The song features Diddy speaking in an interlude, giving a classic and very Diddy speech on turncoat friends:

Ayo, it gets f*cked up when your own family start calling you up
Sh*t, money’s the root of all evil
Family start telling you, “You acting different, n****”
You’re goddamn right I’m acting different
With all this motherf*cking money
But then when it comes from your brother, your sister
Your mother, your father, that sh*t hurts you to the core, man
When they start acting like something that you ain’t never motherf*cking seen
You done grew up motherf*cker
They gave birth to you, know what I’m saying?
You got raised, you done played in the park with them
This money thing, this sh*t will f*ck you up, man
You got to watch what you ask for
You sure you want this son? You sure you want this money?

Again, Ferg didn’t say anything directly about the situation, and while it’s kind of a reach to assume that he specifically meant to address his former crewmates’ comments about him with the video — it’s not much of one. Meanwhile, Ferg’s been branching out with his music, specifically tapping into New York’s drill movement with the help of Jay Gwuapo and Lil Wayne on “No Ceilings” and featuring on Nas’ new album King’s Disease alongside Fivio Foreign. He also collaborated with Nicki Minaj on “Move Ya Hips.”

See ASAP Ferg’s mysterious possible response above.

Donovan Mitchell is on the verge of a big payday. One day after the Utah Jazz fell in Game 7 of their first round series to the Denver Nuggets, Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports reports that the extension-eligible Mitchell and the Jazz will hammer out a new max contract right at the start of free agency this year. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, free agency is slated to begin in mid-October.

As Mitchell explained to Haynes, he had some concerns about potentially getting hurt in the Bubble and jeopardizing that big payday, but they subsided pretty quickly.

“Once my teammates told me they wanted to play, then I was all in. I couldn’t make it all about myself,” Mitchell said. “There are younger guys who aren’t established in this league and needed this time to show their value. It would have been selfish of me to stand in the way of that. I couldn’t let my contract get in the way of the bigger picture. I had to rely on God. If I got hurt, it was God’s will. But I put my trust in Him and didn’t worry about potentially getting injured. That allowed me to go out there and play. My faith was in God.”

The max extension for a player in Mitchell’s situation is projected to be $170 million over five years. While Utah was unable to make it past Denver, the third-year All-Star guard was magnificent in the series, playing perhaps the best stretch of basketball in his young career. Mitchell averaged 36.3 points on 52.9 percent shooting from the field and 51.6 percent shooting for three against the Nuggets while chipping in five rebounds and 4.9 steals in 37.7 minutes a night.

Mitchell isn’t the only major piece to the Jazz’s puzzle that is eligible for a huge payday this fall. Rudy Gobert is eligible for a supermax extension, and there’s no word on how talks are progressing between the big man’s camp and the franchise.

It’s no secret that Post Malone loves Nirvana. Back in April, the musician hosted a benefit livestream concert. But instead of performing his own hits, Posty covered all of his favorite Nirvana tracks. Now, Posty has been seen shredding another tribute to Nirvana, this time in a jam session with his close friends.

Since the musician still can’t play live shows, he’s been linking up with fellow musicians to try his hand at a number of covers. Linking up with YouTuber Jared Dines, Posty and his crew covered a number of songs from likes of Nirvana, Motley Crue, and even Wild Cherry. In a series of clips posted to Instagram by Dines, Malone can be seen wielding an electric guitar and even hopping on the drum kit to assist the group in a very metal cover of Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” and Nirvana’s “Breed.”

The videos were posted over the weekend, but it looks like they may have been filmed months ago, before Malone shaved his head (a look he appears to have stuck with based on recent Instagram posts) and got new tattoos.

Ahead of the jam session, Posty’s Nirvana livestream raised an impressive amount of money to benefit charity. His fans were on board with the covers he chose and the livestream event raised $4.3 million for relief funds, breaking the $1 million mark in just the first hour. The even also received a co-sign from former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselić and even Courtney Love.

Watch Post Malone jam out above.

It’s hard to think about something that’s going to happen in eight years when it’s not really certain what tomorrow will look like. Regardless, the 2028 Summer Olympics are set to descend on Los Angeles in nearly a decade from now, and an event of this scale takes a lot of preparation. So, the City Of Angels Olympic And Paralympic Committee have gotten things started by unveiling the official logo for the 2028 event today. Additionally, they worked with artists to come up with alternate designs, and Billie Eilish was among the participants.

Each of the artists were given the standard “LA28” emblem and told to design their own version of the A. Eilish’s is italicized, green, and features trailing spikes coming out of its left side. Overall, it looks similar to the New Balance logo.

LA28 Coordination Commission Chair Nicole Hoevertsz said of the new base logo, “The emblem perfectly represents the city’s energy, creativity and strong sense of community, whilst also celebrating the Olympic belief of unity in diversity. LA28 continues to create innovative ways to engage Angelenos and people from across the world in the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The idea behind the emblem, and the expressions we have seen so far, truly demonstrate that we are stronger together.”

Check out some of the other logos below.

Kanye West’s renewed interest in religion has led him down some pretty odd roads. He recently admitted on Nick Cannon’s podcast that he spent around $50 million on his Sunday Services around the nation, he compared Christians to Michael Jordan during an interview with Vogue last December, he infamously requested his collaborators refrain from sex during the recording process, he brainstormed a “clean” version of TikTok called “Jesus Tok,” and he made whatever this was supposed to be.

But during that same interview with Nick Cannon, he also credited the Man Upstairs with one of his more infamous missteps: His 2009 VMAs outburst in which he crashed the stage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for winning Best Female Video to snatch the mic and declare Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” one of the “best videos of all time.” As Kanye told Cannon:

If God didn’t want me to run on stage and say, “Beyonce had the best video,” He wouldn’t have sat me in the front row. I would’ve been sitting in the back. He wouldn’t have made it the first award. And [He] wouldn’t have made it so ridiculous of an idea ’cause I had never heard of this person before that night. And “Single Ladies” is, like, one of the greatest videos of all time… And I was only drinking Hennessy because I didn’t want to go to the awards show ’cause it was a set-up!

It’s one hell of an explanation — pun most definitely intended, thank you very much. While he does provide a little more context — certainly, he wasn’t the only person who’d never heard Swift’s “You Belong with Me” before then — we’re going to file this one under “Kanye’s semi-facetious hyperbolic statements that will inevitably be taken wildly out of context.” That said, it’s a moment that helped launch both Swift and West into an entirely new tier of superstardom and at least one of them is actually trying to save this country so maybe it really is God’s plan, and He just works in mysterious ways.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Angel Olsen released her 2016 record My Women on a career high — the album had launched the singer out of her lo-fi indie typecast and landed her across headlines and Album Of The Year lists. But while she was celebrating success, Olsen was also grappling with the repercussions of leaving a long-term relationship. Losing her partner also meant losing some close friends and even a part of herself. As a seasoned songwriter, Olsen processed the breakup the way she knew best: She boarded a plane to the sleepy and evergreen town of Anacortes, Washington to let her heartbreak flow out of her in Phil Elverum’s church-turned-studio.

The introspective sessions were not only cathartic, but also resulted in Whole New Mess, an album that’s purposefully unpolished and touched with post-breakup melodrama. The collection of songs would stand as the bare-bones blueprint for Olsen’s recent, new age-adjacent record All Mirrors. But Whole New Mess is not a simple collection of demos. It’s an emotional purge, a heartsore reflection of revelations, reveries, and broken promises — both from her ex-lover and from herself. It’s a vulnerable assemblage of reminders of what originally made fans fall in love with the singer’s haunting and poetic 2012 debut full-length Half Way Home. With an intimate look into the journey of self-healing on Whole New Mess, Olsen comes full circle both in her career and personal life.

Apart from two brand-new tracks, Whole New Mess is lyrically identical to All Mirrors. But with the production paired down to a spacious guitar and Olsen’s ethereal voice, the new album could not be further from its predecessor. Where All Mirrors is lush and cinematic, Whole New Mess is sparse and sequestered. “(We Were All Mirrors)” embodies the stark contrast between the two efforts. The song, which would eventually become her opulent All Mirrors title track, opens with Olsen’s listless lyrical delivery. The roomy production leaves the singer sounding physically distant, inching closer until a swell of screeching strings underscores the second verse. “I keep movin’,” she croons, her voice quavering as it lurches over the final word, like she’s convincing herself that moving on is necessary even if she doesn’t quite believe it’s feasible.

Whole New Mess is also devoid of the grandiose synths heard on her last release. Instead, the instrumentals implore listeners to focus on lyricism and confront minute details in Olsen’s delivery, uncovering how she oftentimes repeats choice phrases. She lays out a clear mantra on the album’s title track, one song that doesn’t have an All Mirrors counterpart. Strumming each chord with anguish, Olsen echoes her guitar’s wailing tones and belts out an honest account of her emotional journey. “I stretch my bones out on the floor / I think I really do the change.” Repeating the latter line threefold, Olsen reassures herself that growing from mistakes is possible, though difficult.

Where Whole New Mess departs from All Mirrors, it marks a return to her candid and confessional early catalog. Songs like “Chance (Forever Love)” display emotion through a piercing inflection akin to the throaty-yet-penetrating intonation heard on her debut effort’s “Acrobat” or the Strange Cacti number “Creator/Destroyer.” Similarly, tracks like “Lark Song” call back to Olsen’s lo-fi days, placing her voice at the forefront and drenching it in warm reverb.

Much of the fuzzy production on the record is thanks to location. Aptly recorded in a church, Whole New Mess is Olsen’s sermon on dejected self-understanding. Though it’s not the type of record that can be thrown on to accompany casual dinner party banter, the album curates a type of self-exploration fit for late-night identity crises and stands as Olsen’s masterclass on unguarded songwriting.

Whole New Mess offers the type of vulnerability that’s generally expected from an Olsen album but was missing on All Mirrors. Equally painful and cathartic, Olsen loses herself completely in each song. She wields her voice as a second instrument and experiments with tone, atmosphere, and resonance. The result is an album that parallels Olsen’s early catalog while distinctly displaying her growth as a songwriter, instrumentalist, and overall person.

Whole New Mess is out now via Jagjaguwar. Get it here.

Tiger King isn’t going away anytime soon. Netflix will likely launch some spinoffs, Peacock is working on a scripted series with Kate McKinnon starring as rival/animal activist Carole Baskins, and Baskins is making a ton of money on Cameo, all while the family of Baskins’ late husband, Don Lewis, is still inquiring about his whereabouts. Oh, and Cardi B did not hold back her thoughts on that situation, so expect scrutiny of Baskins to continue, especially since she’s preparing to do Dancing With The Stars.

Yes, it is happening. Baskins even danced with a stuffed tiger for this GMA-based announcement to make 2020 even weirder.

Baskins will be joined by Jesse Metcalfe, Nelly, Nev Schulman (Catfish), Johnny Weir (he’s got the moves, so he’s my prediction for winner), Anne Heche, Vernon Davis, Skai Jackson, AJ McLean, and Jeannie Mai (Holey Moley). Even more tellingly, Baskins is only one of four cast members who’ve found fame on Netflix (the other two are Monica Aldama of Cheer and Chrishell Stause of Selling Sunset).

As one can imagine, the reaction to Baskins isn’t very positive on social media. Morbid jokes abound, including imagined scenarios of what Baskins might do if her partner doesn’t help her win the show. Also, people are still looking for justice for (or even the whereabouts of) Don Lewis.

This is gonna get messy, but DWTS loves a good controversy.

(Via Hollywood Reporter)

Adrianne Lenker has been promoting one project or another pretty much non-stop over the past few years. Big Thief released albums in 2016, 2017, and two in 2019, while she had a solo album, Abysskiss, in 2018. She’s keeping the streak alive in 2020, as today, she announces a pair of new albums, Songs and Instrumentals. Lenker also released “Anything,” a lovely and delicate folk tune from Songs.

Lenker shared a note describing the process of recording the albums, which began in April when she retreated to a cabin in western Massachusetts with engineer Phil Weinrobe. She wrote of making the albums, “I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe. ”

Listen to “Anything” above. Below, find the art and tracklists for Songs and Instrumentals, as well as Lenker’s full note about the albums.

1. “Two Reverse”
2. “Ingydar”
3. “Anything”
4. “Forwards Beckon Rebound”
5. “Heavy Focus”
6. “Half Return”
7. “Come”
8. “Zombie Girl”
9. “Not A Lot, Just Forever”
10. “Dragon Eyes”
11. “My Angel”

1. “Music For Indigo”
2. “Mostly Chimes”

“It was early March 2020 and the Big Thief tour had just been cut short, so I flew from Europe to NYC. It just so happened that there was a little cabin available for rent right next door to Zoe and Brian in the mountains in Western MA. So I grabbed my truck and drove out to the country. As I settled into the cabin over the course of a month, I grew really connected to the space itself. The one room cabin felt like the inside of an acoustic guitar — it was such a joy to hear the notes reverberate in the space . I got a hankering to capture it, so I called my friend Phil and asked ‘How’d you like to get outta the city and make a record that sounds like the inside of an acoustic guitar?’ Phil said ‘100%’ and by the grace of some of our dear friends, we were able to gather the materials needed. Brendan lent us about 45 tape machines. Eli lent us a binaural head (which looked remarkably like Phil), and Shahzad lent us a pile of XLR cables. I drove into the city at 5am on the 20th of April, scooped up Phil and then we filled my truck to the brim as we stopped and gathered the gear along the way back to Massachusetts.

We unloaded all of the equipment into the small cabin and began setting up. Unfortunately, one of the first things that happened was the unstable electricity fried four of our tape machines, including the Otari 8 track. Bill tried to fix it at his shop in Sturbridge, but it was beyond repair.

After almost three weeks of setup and troubleshooting, the studio finally was operating — although the only functioning tape recorder we had was Phil’s battery powered Sony Walkman. We felt at peace with the idea that we might just be recording the whole record on cassette tape, but that would have meant no overdubs, so I’m grateful for the rescue Otari 8 Track that Brendan was able to dig out of storage and deliver to us right before we had lost all hope.

I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe.

Nine of these songs were written freshly during the recording session. We began and closed each day with an improvised acoustic guitar instrumental, and we made a collage of our favorite pieces, which became the first side of the instrumentals album.

I’m grateful that this music has come into existence. These songs have helped me heal. I hope that at least in some small way this music can be a friend to you.”

Songs and Instrumentals are out 10/23 via 4AD. Pre-order them here.