9. Peter LaughnerBox Set
I first heard Peter Laughner when I was on the first Six Organs tour in maybe 2004. Not counting Rocket From The Tombs, just his solo stuff. I didn’t know he had done solo stuff and I was staying with a friend in Boston, Ron Schneiderman, who plays in Sunburned Hand Of The Man. I was crashing at his house, and he put on a Peter Laughner bootleg, and it kind of blew my mind. What I was into at the time was songwriters and I was in a Townes Van Zandt phase, you know, a lot of songwriting that’s dripping with pathos and all of that stuff you listen to when you’re a lot younger, drinking a little more. But I’ve just been a fan of his since then. And I tend to listen to Peter Laughner a lot when I’m on tour. I don’t know what it is. There’s a certain type of loneliness when you’re on tour, even when you’re touring with a band. Not just being homesick, but there’s a certain loneliness that Peter Laughner really locks into perfectly when you’re on tour.
This is probably the newest record on the list because it only came out a few years ago, but it’s just an amazing collection of his music, a lot of it recorded at home, with a four-track recorder. And there’s a bunch of cover songs on there, there are different versions of some classic songs that you know from him, like ‘Amphetamine’. And it comes with a brilliant book, like a hardback book that that has all these articles and a lot of articles that he wrote because he was also a journalist as well, writing reviews of different things. It’s just really a massive thing. But as a document of all the work that he did and all the songs that he was doing, it’s very inspiring.
