Y’all, it’s been a while—we missed you. The end of 2022 has been a wild ride, and herein is its final Paradisiacal dispatch. ‘Tis the season to give records to beloved friends and family (and to yourself too). In lieu of the madness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we prefer to observe Krampus Day (honoring the Central European folkloric anti-Santa critter).
This spring, Chapman tours in support of an album for the first time in his long career, with a full band. Gun Outfit hits the road in the Midwest and South with Steve Gunn in a killer Gunn-Gun attack.
Or, that time that Michael didn’t recognize his ex-wife. The unflinching, bittersweet “After All This Time” features the voice of UK songwriting hero and longtime Chapman friend and collaborator Bridget St John. Floating on a cloud of BJ Cole’s pedal steel guitar, it’s as weightless and lovely as “It’s too Late” is brooding and menacing.
The masterful follow-up to his universally celebrated 2017 album 50, True North finds the elder statesman of British songwriting and guitar plumbing an even deeper deep and honing an ever keener edge to his iconic writing. Once again Steve Gunn produces and plays guitar, and Bridget St John sings, with cellist Sarah Smout and legendary pedal steel player BJ Cole. Hear “It’s Too Late” via Billboard, check out the limited red-wine vinyl, and pre-order.
Thanks very much to NPR’s Morning Edition and Joel Rose for this morning’s lovely story on Michael Chapman, in which the Fully Qualified Survivor, along with producer Steve Gunn and critic Andrew Male, looks back at his long career and discusses why Yorkshiremen are cheap, how his career started with a rainstorm, why he never sings sober, and his moving, universally acclaimed new record 50 (which you can order, and hear, below.)
We’re excited to welcome to PoB Mr. James Elkington, whose masterful guitar playing and arranging you’ve certainly heard, even if you didn’t realize it. An inveterate collaborator, Jim has been the other guitarist in Steve Gunn’s band since Way Out Weather. He has also toured and/or recorded with Michael Chapman (on 50), Nathan Salsburg (on Ambsace), Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, Joan Shelley, Tortoise, and Brokeback, just to name some of his many enthusiastic admirers. Stay tuned for details on his debut solo album, and catch him onstage this week with Jake Xerxes Fussell and Wilco.
If you require a mind-expanding tonic to our national spell of ignorant, truculent insanity, the new Mind Over Mirrors album Undying Color is available today in your favorite record shops and online merchants, digital and physical alike. Listen, read critical acclaim for the album, learn about Secretly Group’s Our First 100 Days Project, and catch up on current and upcoming PoB tours.
If you need a distraction from the eldritch horrors of Inauguration Day, take a lesson from the Fully Qualified Survivor. Get thee to your local record store to grip what is shaping up to be one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2017. Or, as Laura Snapes (Pitchfork, NPR, Guardian) recently recommended: “If you’re looking for a peaceful record for this torrid week, 50 is it.” Check out Uncut’s career-spanning 7pp. feature and new rave reviews in The Times, Daily Mirror, i, etc.
January 20th sees the release of Michael Chapman’s 50, produced by Steve Gunn and described by Pitchfork as “a startlingly current and nearly apocalyptic vision of America… an album full of brimstone and brine, perhaps more perfect for this moment in history than we’d like to admit.” Now Stereogum presents 50 in its entirety.
Taken from his anticipated album 50, out January 20th, the hellish travelogue approaches a pure distillation of the perfect Chapman song, with its dark lyrics and mesmerizing, elastic instrumental passages. (We’re snowed in here in North Carolina, so it feels particularly apropos to the season.)
