Strangers & Friends
Album releases:
December 15th: CSA members & radio
All members of my Community-Supported Art patronage program, Patreon Patrons and Bandcamp subscribers will find the album in their folder of albums by that date, and anyone who contributed to the crowdfunding campaign that made the album possible will also get the album download link. On this date, the album will also be made available via the Pacifica Audioport to any radio programmers affiliated with Pacifica — and to any other radio or internet broadcasters who write me to request a link to download the album!
December 31: podcast album tour
My Song For Today podcast followers get a guided tour of the new album, song by song. The podcast is available on all the usual podcasting platforms, as well as on the David Rovics mobile app.
January 19th: free streaming worldwide plus Album Launch and Rent Party
January 19th will be the release date for the album on Spotify, Apple, Google, and all the other streaming platforms, wherever on the planet they’re available. It will also then be made available in both free streaming and paid download modes on Bandcamp.
About the album:
It’s another collection of original songs of mine, but it came out through a series of unusual circumstances, probably beginning with vocal lessons.
I’ve always been a massive fan of the human voice, as instruments go. Especially multiple voices together. When I first heard Lorna McKinnon’s choral arrangement of my song, “No One Is Illegal,” I started thinking about touring and recording together. In 2016 we toured around Scotland, England and Ireland. Tommy Sands helped me make arrangements to record our gig in his home town of Rostrevor, which became a live album.
When my friend Kamala Emanuel heard Lorna’s singing and choral arranging, she wanted to take singing lessons from her. One thing led to another, and the singing lessons became a collaborative effort involving making lots more choral arrangements to my songs.
When I ran into Pol Mac Adaim last summer and he mentioned that he occasionally records other artists at a home studio in Ireland, the plan fell into place. We made plans to meet up with Pol in Ireland, where we all spent the last week of October.
Along the way we all learned that Pol is a brilliant producer and engineer as well as multi-instrumentalist. Entering the project with no plans other than a lot of vocal harmonies, once Pol ascertained what many other producers have learned before him, that I can’t count very well, we spent a day laying down my vocal and guitar tracks, and the rest of a week recording layers of vocal harmonies.
In the weeks following, Pol recorded a glorious variety of parts of a number of songs, with whistles, pipes, a harmonica, and a bit of synth, mixed all the tracks and did other magic to them, to result in the collection of compositions we have here.
Track List
01 Living on the Streets of LA
02 Just A Renter
03 So This Is What It’s Like
04 When the Nazis Came to Rotherham
05 My Great Grandparents
06 Reality Winner
07 Jock
08 Failed State
09 Oil Blockade
10 In Venezuela
11 I Was A Stranger
12 The Time To Act
13 A Penny A Play
14 If There’s A Tomorrow