Many thanks to American Songwriter for premiering “I’ve Got Mine,” the dilatory, improvised blues that is the hinge of Mike Cooper’s classic 1970 album Trout Steel. You can preorder the reissued album, along with its 1971-72 companion Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co., here. Purchase the single from iTunes here.

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Cooper himself offers this dispatch from Spain on the subject:

“I’m actually in Spain at the moment up the coast some way from where that song was written in the early 70s,” Cooper says when reached for comment. “I was very much into the works of the mystic sufi poets such as Rumi at that time and the lyric uses a lot of the same symbolism that they used. It was also the first song that we decided to let the musicians have a totally free field to improvise over the pulse – plus we experimented with some delay echo effects influenced by the (at the time) very early dub music.”

In case you missed it, here’s “The Singing Tree” from Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co., premiered a while back by The Wall Street Journal and available for purchase from iTunes here.

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