Following 2011’s Kiss Each Other Clean, which debuted at number two on the US Billboard chart, Ghost on Ghost is to be the fifth studio album from Austin-based Sam Beam.
While Rolling Stone said of Kiss Each Other Clean that “pop music hadn’t seen anything like it since the heyday of Cat Stevens,” and Pitchfork said it “more closely resembles the lush, gold-toned singer songwriter records of the late 60s and early 70s —Astral Weeks, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” Beam felt it time to move from what he called the “anxious tension” from this record and his previous one (The Shepherd’s Dog). “This record felt like a reward to myself after the way I went about making the last few,” he says.
Recorded in New York and produced by Beam’s longtime associate Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Califone, Fruit Bats), helping achieve Beam’s vision was a group of stellar musicians including Rob Burger of Tin Hat Trio, Steve Bernstein, Tony Scherr, Kenny Wollesen, and Briggan Krauss of Sex Mob, jazz drummer Brian Blade, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes of the Jazz Passengers, bassist Tony Garnier (Bob Dylan’s band), cellist Marika Hughes, Maxim Moston and Doug Wieselman of Antony and the Johnsons, and Anja Wood. Burger (Tin Hat Trio) has worked with Beam intermittently through the years and handled arrangements
for strings and horns on Ghost on Ghost.
For the album’s cover, Beam, who is also a visual artist, chose an image from the series Private Views by noted photographer Barbara Crane.
‘Ghost on Ghost’ will be released 12 April via 4AD/Rhythmethod
