1. When You Go
2. My Love Is An Ocean Away (band version)
The new single When You Go will be released upon the world on Dec 1st, 2014. You can pre-order it now to have it sent straight to your door as soon as we at Flippin Yeah get our hands on it. It’s available in two tangible formats.
You can order the vinyl 7″ at FLIPPIN YEAH for $10 + postage. It’s numbered and limited to 300.
You can order the CD single at FLIPPIN YEAH for $5 + postage. Also limited numbers.
Here’s a story I wrote about the songs:
Even as I got on the train with my Amtrak pass to head into the Deep South I had no real plan formulated. I’d sent some demos to a bunch of studios down there that I literally liked the sound of but only one had replied. Andrija Tokic emailed back from his home in Nashville, and having never heard of me thankfully said, “Great songs! I’d love to work together.” I was buoyed by this news, although Andrija had just had great and deserved success with the Alabama Shakes album, amongst others, and ever since not many of the days on his calendar were left unturned. I locked down a single session, the only one available.
Weeks later when I arrived with a kinked neck and a notebook of new lyrics, we did that day and I found Andrija to be a ball of enthusiastic encouragement and a launching pad for my whole journey. He’s gathered a tight group of musicians around him and he nurtures them like a proud uncle (even though he’s pretty much a kid, with tattoos, a Hawaiian shirt and a cap designed to be the top half of an alligator).
But the single you’re holding, When You Go, comes a bit later. I’ll try and be quick. From Nashville onwards certain chance events would propel me to the next destination. A series of these took me to New Orleans and back, with a stop in Memphis. I found myself late at night at a neighbourhood Video Store called Black Lodge, a converted old house that acted as a kind of headquarters to Memphis’ underground grunge film scene and its filmmakers. They sent me away with some great examples on DVD, two of which I loved: Hustle and Flow, and Black Snake Moan. Both were steeped in the raw music of the region. I did some research and found the man responsible for the soundtracks: Scott Bomar. I read that on the side he had also assembled a band of local soul music legends to make a new group called the Bo-Keys. And now talking to the man himself on the phone he said he had a ton of vintage gear in his studio but only two days spare. I took em both.
We recorded four songs there, When You Go being the first. Scott picked the drummer, who turned out to be formally of the Afghan Whigs. I showed him a kind of jaunty pop melody I’d been working on. He was a pretty quiet fellow and seemed to take the whole thing very seriously, really listening to me and tapping away on his jeans as I played it a few more times. He walked to the kit and asked me if it was ok for him to dig in on the toms a little bit. Sure!
We hit record, Scott in the control room on bass. After a few takes, listening to the playback I looked up to see an unusual electric sitar hanging on the wall. Scott said it’d been there for years but no one had used it on anything yet. I took that as a challenge.
And here it is! See what you think?
So this is a doorway to the record proper. When You Go is probably the more obviously link to my older stuff. From Memphis, as I went deeper into the South and the project itself, I became more influenced by my surroundings and the weirdos I met and I think a lot of the other songs reflect that.
And then it all came back around to Andrija. I met up with him after it was all finished, hungry for more but dry of material, so I just re-recorded one of the album tracks with a different band to make a gentle folk piano ballad reading of My Love Is An Ocean Away.
And then, with more of his exuberant and fervent alchemy, Andrija mixed both of them beautifully. Well at least to my ears, he found qualities in the songs I didn’t know were there.
Darren Hanlon
November, 2014
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The reason it has taken so long is that I’m attempting to write a book about the process and journey, to be released alongside the album. I plan to have them out together in February 2015 on my own label here in Australia 