VIA PRESS RELEASE | Newly signed to Fire Records, The Dream Syndicate announce a special edition reissue of their 1986 album Out of the Grey. Available on CD for the first time in 24 years, this collection is deliciously remastered over a limited deluxe three disc box set. Featuring 34 unheard recordings, it includes a previously unreleased live 1985 album alongside many unreleased demos and outtakes with rare photos, interviews, and new liner notes from Pat Thomas.
The Days of Wine and Roses era of The Dream Syndicate was so short-lived it’s become mythological. However, some nerds have grown so attached to it that they’ve never been able to accept the Paul B. Cutler and Mark Walton years, partly because the Out of the Grey album wasn’t mastered correctly. It didn’t have enough low-end, for example. But for anyone who caught the band live between ’85 and ’87, they saw devastatingly wicked live shows.
Hidden inside of Out of the Grey are some of Wynn’s strongest songs. “Slide Away” is delightful pop, “Now I Ride Alone” is moody and intense “like the hardboiled typewriting of novelists Jim Thompson, Ross MacDonald, and James Cain” that Steve Wynn told Pat Thomas that he dug when they chatted in a Rochester, New York hotel room back in July ‘85. (The day after Pat recorded the previously unreleased live album included in this box set). There’s also the epic “Boston,” which imagines the era in which Van Morrison was holed-up in that city circa 1967-68 writing the songs that comprised Astral Weeks.
It’s discs 2 and 3 that have the real magic! All unreleased material—including a never-before-heard July 1985 live album which has the ‘balls to the wall’ energy hard not captured in the studio. The songs were so damn fresh on that July night -they had not been recorded in the studio yet. On Disc 3, you’ll hear alternate versions of several Out of the Grey songs recorded as “demos” before the album versions. These studio versions also have the raw energy of the live show, plus the band plays rare cover versions by Pink Floyd, Cream, Santana, Green on Red, Alice Cooper, Temptations, and Dolly Parton!
A new 51 song deluxe collection of Dream Syndicate recordings released under the title of: What Can I Say? no regrets… Out of the Grey + Live, Demos & Outtakes is released on 14th January 2022 on Fire Records.
