New Music - Paul Westerberg

In the latest case of guerilla album marketing & release, Paul Westerberg dropped his latest album, a 44-minute hodgepodge of home recordings called 49:00, yesterday. Surprise! His idea was to charge $0.01 per minute, but if you hold him to that you’ll surely feel gypped seeing as the running time comes in 5 minutes short of that. Whatever Paul.

The album is available as 1 MP3 track via Amazon, the only retailer who agreed to the rather innovative release strategy and pricing. Like virtually everything he’s released over the past 6 or 7 years, it’s a complete mess with moments of shining brilliance - for cryin’ out loud it’s Paul Westerberg knocking instruments around in his basement and stitching some songs together. And in typical Westerberg fashion the best song of all may well be sloppy-as-all-hell-but-still-radiant-ballad that starts at around the 36 minute mark, long after most of the distracting noise and nonsense. Go buy it here, it‘s 49 damn cents.
----------------------------------------------

In unrelated Westerberg news, you may have heard about the second set of Replacements reissues, which will be released in September on CD and through digital retailers. The reissue series will cover the Sire years - Tim, Pleased To Meet Me, Don’t Tell A Soul, and All Shook Down. Lots of unreleased material featured in the track lists, including the stone classic “Nowhere Is My Home” from the Tim sessions. Peter Jesperson (The Mats’ long time producer and friend) left some comments on this blog regarding the first set of reissues a few months back - check those out here. Pitchfork has the full details on this latest set.
----------------------------------------------

Here’a a few songs recorded live from Saturday Nov. 6, 2004 @ The Pantages:

MP3 :: AAA
MP3 :: Waitress In The Sky
MP3 :: Knockin’ On Mine
MP3 :: I.O.U.
MP3 :: Can’t Hardly Wait
----------------------------------------------

Related :: [bootleg] The Replacements - “Simply Unacceptable”
----------------------------------------------

No comments: