The new deluxe red vinyl edition of the classic`Warmer Corners’ (matcd039) album from Australian favorites The Lucksmiths is out now! All preorders have shipped and there are approximately 40 copies remaining so grab one quick if you have not already. For more details on the history of the release and the reissue, please see the post below.
Thinking back on the release as it reached its legal status, lead guitarist and songwriter Marty Donald had the following remarks:
If I was forced to pick (and very occasionally I am), I’d say ‘Warmer Corners’ is my favourite Lucksmiths album. It came at a sweet spot in our career: we’d been playing together long enough to have worked out what we were doing, and become a little more ambitious with it. We had toured overseas a fair bit by then, getting to places I never dreamt we would, and playing to bigger crowds when we returned – and the shows we would play on the back of this album were among the most memorable we ever did. (Our broadened horizons were reflected in the settings of the songs we wrote for Warmer Corners: San Francisco, Trujillo, Kansas City.) My own songs felt like some of the best I had written; I’d thought that Mark and Tali’s contributions to our previous record, ‘Naturaliste’, were amazing, and I tried to push myself this time around. Most importantly, Louis joining the band gave us a perfectly timed shot in the arm. Even at the time, the album felt to me like a bit of a milestone for us, so it’s hard to believe that more than 20 years have since passed – but then my memories of that time are definitely a little hazy now.
I do remember the four of us working on ‘The Chapter in Your Life Entitled San Francisco’ in the spare room of my house in Brunswick, where Marky was crashing when he was home from overseas – how exciting it was when Louis came up with that guitar line, and how good it felt to be making music together again. This was 2004, the height of Melbourne’s “gangland wars”: I remember playing ‘Great Lengths’ to Em for the first time in that same room (which was to become a nursery the next year!), and being drowned out by police helicopters overhead, after Lewis Moran was killed just around the corner.
To record, we returned to the familiar confines of Audrey Studios in North Richmond, again working with Craig Pilkington, who had done our previous two albums. We had developed a real musical understanding by that point, and his instrumental arrangements were a big part of ‘Warmer Corners’, more elaborate and prominent and integral to the songs than they had been before. The opening track, ‘A Hiccup in Your Happiness’, makes a bit of a statement of this: it starts off very stripped back (like much of ‘Naturaliste’ had been), and then all of a sudden the strings swirl in and the horns sidle up. Listening back all these years later, it still sounds kind of thrilling to me – like great things are about to happen.
To celebrate the reissue, the band created an archival video of first single ‘The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco’ and it premiered on top blog Austin Town Hall yesterday.
The album is available now in the Matinée shop and all smart retailers. As with all recent Lucksmiths reissues, we are working with the fine folks at the Lost and Lonesome Recording Company in Australia to make this available, so please visit their shop for a copy if you are closer to there than here for better postage rates. The Matinée clearance sale is still in effect at our shop so you can add some tasty gems to your order and we’ll ship it all together. These prime savings are unprecedented, so take advantage of them now to help offset the current postage rates.
While you’re shopping, have a listen to a few ‘Warmer Corners’ classics on the player below!