VIA PRESS RELEASE | Anthology Recordings (Mexican Summer’s reissue arm home to releases and compilations from Pharoah Sanders, Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes, Paul Major’s Feel the Music and Unusual Sounds) announce a new compilation called Sad About The Times out May 17. The new release explores North American ’70s FM from folk, soft rock, West Coast jangle, power pop and more. Sad About The Times is a companion piece of sorts to Anthology’s V/A – Follow The Sun, which focuses on ’70s FM through a distinctly Australian lens.
Sad About The Times was compiled by Mikey Young (Total Control / Eddy Suppression Ring) and Keith Abrahamsson (Founder / Head of A&R at Anthology Recordings). Young explains the new compilation, “For nearly all my 41-year-old life, my most constant joy has been to find new music to love. My next move is usually to force the people around me to listen and hope they feel the same joy. Teenage friends and crushes didn’t care at all about the knowledge I was imparting or the mixtapes I was laboring over, I’m pretty damn sure. City life was a little more receptive, though dj’ing what I heard as totally life changing, life affirming jams at bars to dudes requesting GnR didn’t always make it feel so. The occasional radio show gives me an outlet to continue sharing tunes but sometimes that feels like firing noise into a blackhole filled with all the other bazillion archival radio streams.
Doing these comps with Keith seem like the logical progression of what I’ve always loved doing. They are the most tangible, most fulfilling experiences I’ve had discovering and sharing music. I’ve learnt a ton and heard songs that make me feel as ecstatic as I did when I first heard songs that made me feel ecstatic. That’s maybe the best thing about doing these, realizing that can still happen.”
You are alone in a hot tub on a warm summer night back in the ’70s. Scarcely a week earlier she was right there with you, laughing, gazing at the stars, the FM radio playing the top pop hits as you frolicked in the gurgling water. Now she’s gone. Really gone.
Then a song you never heard before comes on the radio. You feel like it reaches into some place that has already been prepared in your mind. It is as if the song is reading you. The song really knows she’s gone, and more. What a great hook, you think.
Then you never hear it again. You remember it really captured the way you felt, it sounded sad but somehow had a healing quality. Down but not out. It seemed familiar the first time you heard it, as if it had cut to the front of the line while the other meaningful songs in your life were taking years to get there. What was that song?
I have good news for you. It’s on this album even if it’s not on this album.
What we are talking about here is a time when there was only so much room at the top and limited alternatives to mainstream radio for a song to get heard. I made up the guy in the hot tub but not the nature of the song. It doesn’t matter exactly what the song is.
Every song on this album is that song. They all could have been hits. Each with a different flavor, all subtly conveying universal emotions that are hard to describe but easy to feel. Little room at the top back then (another reason to be sad about the times…) but we have plenty of room in 2019.
These songs come in the wake of the psychedelic sixties after the high-flying idealism had run its course and singer songwriters were ascendant. After the party, reality kicks in. You have to deal with yourself about how you deal with your friends and lovers.
You can’t always work it out but you can sprinkle a little sugar on your sadness with songs like these to keep you company. You can hear echoes of folk rock, soft rock, even detect some psychedelic flashbacks but the atmosphere is dominated by that human being whose voice you are hearing. He’s not up on stage, he’s in your mirror.
Have you ever felt sad about the times you are living in? Anyone who hasn’t seems to me at first lucky, but perhaps simultaneously cursed. This music reaches because it resonates with experiences in your own life that made you feel sad and alone. The artists here are dealing with difficult emotions.
There’s a reason smiley faces don’t have ears. Sadness can be life affirming; these songs can open that door. If they couldn’t they wouldn’t be so enjoyable. “Heaven is boring, hell is where the action is” someone said but if you mix the two together you might come up with some songs like these.
Sad About The Times is a set of North American ’70s jammers. With a hint of (at times) West Coast jangle, these tracks traverse the border between the power pop of the times and a late-night coke jam.
Compilation Track List
1. West – Sad About The Times
2. Hollins Ferry – Lonely City
3. Randy & The Goats – N.Y. Survivor
4. Willow – Loaves And Fishes
5. Art Lown – Deep Blue Sea
6. Jode – Tomorrow Is Gone
7. Norma Tanega – Illusion
8. Perth County Conspiracy – If You Can Want
9. David Chalmers – Hotel Room
10. Jim Spencer – Another Lonely Day
11. Hoover – Absolute Zero
12. Space Opera – Holy River
13. Roger Rodier – Am I Supposed To Let It By Again (Above The Covers)
14. Emmett Finley – Paula’s Song
15. Sky – Sing For Me
16. The Smubbs – The Running Water
17. Oliver Klaus – Here Comes The Sun
18. Antonia Lamb – Wolf
19. Kevin Vicalvi – Lover Now Alone
20. Boz Metzdorf – Sails Across The Sea
21. Dennis Stoner – Maybe Someday/Maybe Never
