On 9th April, The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project are set to release a second volume of covers of the late Gun Club leader’s unreleased music. The follow up to 2009’s We Are Only Riders, The Journey Is Long will feature the likes of Mick Harvey, Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch, Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan and Warren Ellis. It also features a collaborative take on ‘The Breaking Hands’ by Nick Cave & Debbie Harry, which finds the pair collaborating on a maudlin piano ballad. Listen here.
<iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no"
src="http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ft
racks%2F40343463&show_artwork=true&secret_token=s-LBflM">
“The idea was that, these are not our songs, we merely interpret them,” said Pierce’s collaborator Cypress Grove, who recorded many of the original sketches of these songs on cassette before Pierce’s death in 1996. “This is not a tribute project, which usually consists of third rate re-treads of an artist’s most famous work, but brand new material from beyond the grave. In some cases the artists have had to finish the songs, so there can be no nonsense about this not being as good as the original version, as these are the original versions! It’s a musical collective of artists who have come together to interpret or complete skeletal, unfinished material by Jeffrey. Where possible we have used Jeffrey’s contributions, so he actually appears posthumously on this album."
The Journey Is Long is released through Glitterhouse on April 9th.
