Peter Wolf Teams With Neko Case, Shelby Lynne on New Album
Peter Wolf will release 'Midnight Souvenirs,' his first new album in eight years, this coming March. For the record, the occasional J. Geils Band frontman has some help, with Shelby Lynne, Merle Haggard and Neko Case offering their services on duets. As for those choices, Wolf tells Spinner he went with artists who fit the song. "With 'Tragedy,' for instance, as soon as we finished it I thought, 'It'd be great if we could get Shelby Lynne. I think she'd be perfect,'" he says. "So that's more or less how it went."
Case, who appears on the beautiful country-tinged 'The Green Fields of Summer,' is an old friend of Wolf's. "My friendship with Neko came out of just first seeing her band and helping them all get some dinner after the gig," he says. "We just became friends that way."
Getting Haggard, who sings on 'It's Too Late for Me,' was a big honor for Wolf. "Merle embodies all the traditions of country music for sure and I've been a fan of his since his beginning," he says. "He's somebody that as a songwriter I find with the same way rock 'n' roll people might think of Van Morrison or Bob Dylan. The song had such a Floyd Kramer feel and sort of Bradley Barnes aspect to it and the first person that came to mind for me was someone like Merle."
Wolf is one of rock's most soulful frontmen, bringing full-on R&B throughout his career, but he sees working with three artists with country roots as a natural for a music fan. "I remember when I first met the Stones, Mick and Keith sitting on the floor of a Sheraton Inn singing 'Sing Me Back Home.' And Gram Parsons, who is a big influence to a lot of people, recorded a J. Geils song I wrote," he says. "I think if you're a music lover, the distinction between country, blues and R&B just comes down to music. I listen to George Jones in the same way I listen to Ray Charles -- they're both great vocalists."
The album also brings in the classic rocking soul sound fans of Wolf have come to expect. That mix of styles is part of the reason 'Midnight Souvenirs' was eight years in the making. "I would take a while. I would write a batch of songs and we would weed out the ones I thought were pertinent and then move on," he says. "It was basically trying to figure out which songs made sense that gave it a beginning, a middle, an end. I think more or less I was still trying to make an album."
http://www.spinner.com/2009/12/09/peter-wolf-teams-with-neko-case-shelby-lynne-o...His last lp, Sleepless was terrific.
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Peter Wolf new lp in March '10 (SSC) (Read 2,343 times)
