Don’t Miss New Music From Neil Young, Car Seat Headrest, Natalie Cressman & Ian Faquini + More

Each week Release Day Picks profiles new LPs and EPs Team JamBase will be checking out on release day Friday. This week we highlight new albums from Neil Young, Car Seat Headrest, , Chris Forsyth and Warren Haynes. Read on for more insight into the records we have ready to spin.

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Neil Young- Before And After

Prolific legend Neil Young returns today with his 45th album, Before and After, produced by Lou Adler and Neil Young and mixed by The Volume Dealers — Young and Niko Bolas. This time around Uncle Neil weaves a mostly solo, continuous 48-minute sonic tapestry. Before and After is comprised of more obscure songs — “Comes A Time” is perhaps the most well-known solo tune — from Young’s extensive catalog, stretching back to his Buffalo Springfield days with three gems from the band’s limited but impressive output: “Burned,” “On The Way Home” and “Mr. Soul.” Additionally, several songs on Before and After Neil performed on his 2023 solo acoustic Coastal Tour including “Homefires,” “If You Got Love,” “When I Hold You In My Arms” and album opener “I’m The Ocean,” the latter originally appearing on Young’s 1995 collaborative album with Pearl Jam, Mirror Ball.

“The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece – designed to be listened to that way,” Young said of Before and After. “This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organization, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.”

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Car Seat Headrest – Faces From The Masquerade

Over three nights in March 2022, Car Seat Headrest, performed three sold-out shows in support of their 2020 album, Making a Door Less Open. Those three shows served as the source of the recordings making up the live album, Faces From The Masquerade, which is available now through Matador Records. The live release’s titled references both Car Seat Headrest frontman Will Toldeo’s custom gas-mask worn while performing as well as the tour announcement, which due to the pandemic encouraged attendees to wear masks and “accoutre yourself in whatever further costumery you please” [for an evening of] “music, dancing, and identity loss.” The record features Toledo, and his core bandmates, guitarist Ethan Ives, bassist Seth Dalby and drummer Andrew Katz, along with touring keyboardist Ben Roth. In addition to three songs off Making A Door Less Open, the 14-track live album also includes Car Seat Headrest favorites “Beach Life-In-Death,” “Crows”, “Something Soon,” and “Drunk Drivers / Killer Whales.”

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Natalie Cressman and Ian Faquini – An Old Fashioned Christmas

Natalie Cressman and Ian Faquini released new holiday EP, An Old Fashioned Christmas, through 12/23 Records/GroundUp Music. In honor of Cressman’s late Trey Anastasio Band bandmate James Casey, all proceeds from An Old Fashioned Christmas will benefit The Colorectal Cancer Alliance and Eastern Virginia Medical School’s Hope’s Clinic, providing free colon cancer screenings to those in need. An Old Fashioned Christmas was recorded on Christmas Eve 2022 and features trombonist/vocalist Natalie Cressman and guitarist Ian Faquini performing Christmas classics like “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” along with holiday deep cuts including the title track. The duo also celebrates Faquini’s Brazilian heritage by putting a samba spin on Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” from The Nutcracker. The duo originally intended to stick close to Tchaikovsky’s original arrangement but in attempting to boil the orchestral piece down to a duo format, discovered the samba version.

“I think people forget that half the world celebrates Christmas in the summer,” Faquini said. “[‘Waltz of the Flowers’] just worked better in a duet setting. When I was working out the arrangements, there were some parts that just felt impossible. We were going to miss a lot of different voices from the orchestra.”

“It was late at night and we had been inching our way through the original version,” Cressman recalled. “We just started goofing around, performing it as a samba. Somehow, performing it as a samba gave it some space to be different. It took on a life of its own.”

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Chris Forsyth – Solar Motel (Expanded)

Philadelphia-based guitarist Chris Forsyth originally released Solar Motel in 2013. The album, named after a roadside inn in his home state of New Jersey, featured four sprawling tracks that are included in the expanded edition of the album released today. Along with the original four-song suite, the reissue comes with two songs recorded during the Solar Motel sessions, “Harmonious Dance” and “Long Warm Afternoon.” The expanded record ends with a 20-minute live recording of “Solar Motel Part I” into “Paranoid Cat” from a session at New Jersey radio station WFMU. Regarding the reissue, Forsyth stated:

“Solar Motel is the first record on which I overtly took rock tropes and twisted them into new shapes, incorporating so many of my interests and influences – the twin-guitar elegance of Television, the sprawl of West Coast psych, the boiled down Rock Minimalism of Rhys Chatham, the abstract tangles of free improv, an undercurrent of ecstatic jazz energy, and the studio textures of Eno/Cale/Roxy ‘70s art rock. To the few who’d been paying attention to my musical output to that point, I think the whole package came as a surprise. Certainly there was little in my discography to indicate that anything like this was waiting to bust out. Solar Motel basically set the template for much of what I did for the remainder of that decade.

“In preparing the reissue, I sat down to listen to it for the first time in several years and was struck by how much of what I did in the wake of Solar Motel was somehow a reaction to or an attempt to tease out various elements of that record. I was also surprised to discover two more songs, ‘Long Warm Afternoon’ and ‘Harmonious Dance,’ completed during the Solar Motel sessions that I’d completely forgotten recording, not to mention overdubbing and mixing them. These tracks’ existence reminds me how in flux things were at the time. Solar Motel was conceived very much in the process of its making.”

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Various Artists – Warren Haynes Presents: The Benefit Concert, Vol. 20

Performances from Gov’t Mule, Dave Grohl, Eric Church, Mike Gordon, Jim James, Joe Bonamassa and many others are featured on Warren Haynes Presents: The Benefit Concert, Vol. 20, a live album/concert film out today via Evil Teen Records/Mascot Label Group. The multi-CD/DVD/Blu-ray and vinyl collection includes highlights from the 30th annual Christmas Jam, which took place December 7 and 8, 2018 at ExploreAsheville.com Arena in Asheville, North Carolina. A digital-only installment also arrived today. Gov’t Mule frontman Warren Haynes typically puts on the annual event in his hometown each December. However, the 2018 Christmas Jam concerts wound up being the last until 2022. Over $2.8 million has been raised for the Asheville Area Habitat For Humanity thanks to the benefit shows and accompanying live albums. Haynes shared the following in regards to Volume 20 of the series documenting past Christmas Jams:

“Although Christmas Jam, the main event, is traditionally a one-night event, there have been three occasions where we felt the need to make it two nights — the 20th, 25th, and 30th Anniversaries, each of which featured extraordinary line-ups,” Haynes adds. “The performances being represented in this package are culled from the 30th Anniversary in 2018, which was in itself a milestone for ‘the Jam.’ However, its importance is amplified by the fact that the next year we would take a well-deserved break with every intention of resuming business as usual in 2020, not knowing that 2020 would bring about the COVID-19 pandemic which affected not just the music business, but the entire world. Thankfully, we were able to bring it back in 2022 with a stellar lineup and will continue on this year with another memorable event. It feels great to be back.”

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Compiled by Scott Bernstein, Nate Todd and Andy Kahn.