Description
Label Review.
2017 album with The Jayhawks.
Our Overview.
Wesley Stacie AKA John Wesley Harding (nomenclature taken from title of Bob Dylans album 1963), is British folk/pop singer/songwriter author, university teacher and curator of The Cabinet of Wonders (“A vaudeville night that combines music and literature, resulting in one of the finest nights of entertainment this city has to offer.” The New Yorker). In short, the all round extremely intelligently creative troubadour, has a new album out: the man himself explains his name:
"I’m the last person who should have bothered with a fake name in the first place. I didn’t need a Bowiesque persona, nor did I have a drab real name, but I did need a disguise, assuming that my “career” would tank in about two weeks, proving an embarrassing obstacle to a more attainable-seeming future in academia.
So “John Wesley Harding” it was, founded purely on the coincidence of my Christian name and a Bob Dylan album title. Both I and the cowboy John Wesley Hardin were named for the founder of the Methodist religion (though of the two of us, I’ve probably followed his teachings slightly more closely, having killed fewer people.) For some reason, Dylan misspelled Hardin “Harding”; no one knows why and to my knowledge no one’s ever bothered to ask. (My own favorite theory is that Dylan omitted so many “g”s from titles like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” that he decided on a little restitution.)…I have decided…to ditch the tried and tested “John Wesley Harding” brand in favour of my real name. Why? I am hardly a household name, but whether you’re a Cougar, a Prince or a Harding (and unless you’re a Will Oldham who changes his name from Bonnie-Prince-this to Palace-Songs-that at the drop of a hat), it’s the sort of decision that doesn’t come lightly."
He will release his new album February 2017 via Yep Roc Records. Recorded with The Jayhawks; Gary Louris, Marc Perlman, Tim O’Reagan, and Karen Grotberg at Flowers Studio in Minneapolis, the album was co-produced by Stace and Gary Louris.Albums first track First track ‘Lets Evaporate” written with Chas Cronk from the Strawbs, one of Stace’s favorite bands.
The album features 12 tracks chosen for these sessions by Stace, who says, “I always have a lot of songs, so I listened to every unused song I had, many of them quite recent, and picked 11 that I thought The Jayhawks (or The Wezhawks, as we started to call it) would sound great on. I also included a cover, “Don’t Turn Me Loose,” which is where the idea of our making a record together had originated: I saw them live and thought they’d sound great playing that song, and then I thought: and I should be singing it! And they liked the idea. And we did these twelve songs, and that’s it. Everything we recorded is on the record. No outtakes.”
The second album under his real name, the album’s title was chosen for a myriad of reasons including a) the urge to bring all of his art under one banner, b) Jeff Lynne’s ELO, and c) various cab ride conversations. All is revealed in the sleeve note.