The Nels Cline Singers Release New Album ‘Share The Wealth’
By Nate Todd Nov 13, 2020 • 6:04 am PST
Photo by Sean Ono Lennon
The Nels Cline Singers featuring Wilco guitarist Nels Cline released new album Share The Wealth today via Blue Note Records. Cline co-produced the LP with Eli Crews at The Bunker in Brooklyn.
It took just two days for Cline and his revolving door collective the Nels Cline Singers to record Share The Wealth. This time around the all-star band included longtime collaborator and drummer Scott Amendola, saxophonist Skerik, bassist Trevor Dunn, keyboardist Brian Marsella and percussionist Cyro Baptista.
Cline spoke about working with the new band in a statement. Read his words below:
This band has never even played a live gig together. So basically, the whole thing was an experiment. We recorded all these jams with the idea that I was going to take tiny fragments of them and create this kind of cut-and-paste, collaged, psychedelic record like an Os Mutantes record or something crazy like that. But when I listened back to these jams, I liked them so much that I wanted to keep them intact. And some of the most startling transitions, they’re not edits. They just happened in the course of these long improvisations in the studio, almost like magic.
That magic is evident on tracks like “Beam/Spiral” and The Singers’ interpretation of Brazilian composer Caetano Veloso’s “Segunda,” which Cline also detailed:
I didn’t know anything about the lyrics so I asked Cyro’s wife, Eleonora Alberto, who offered to translate it. It turns out the lyrics are extremely poetic and timely. The song is essentially like a Black Lives Matter anthem. It’s about a black Brazilian ruminating on how people think that blacks are lazy and that the light-skinned people are the industrious people. And it incorporates the idea of White Monday, which is a Catholic holiday in Brazil. So Caetano uses this idea of the working man and the holiday and the legacy of black slavery in Brazil as this kind of potent, poetic statement. And Skerik just launches on this one.
Stream the Nels Cline Singers’ Share The Wealth below:
