The Feelies played WFMU Monty Hall (pics, setlist), gearing up for a new album; Glenn Mercer releasing instrumental LP
photos by P Squared
The Feelies @ WFMU Monty Hall 9/19/2015
The Feelies have written 11 songs and are about to start working on their sixth LP soon. “We’ve got a new album’s worth of songs that we’ve been rehearsing and demoing and right now,” Mercer says on the phone from his New Jersey home/studio.
“It should be a slow, semi-laborious process. Right now, there’s a lot of acoustic guitar. It’s kind of mellow, but there’s some rock-type songs, too,” he says. “We’re trying to cover a lot of ground, be a little experimental. There’s this one song that has a drone, loop-type thing. We’re trying to figure out the best approach to recording. I think we’re going to do it here and we’ll see where it takes us.”
“To me, that’s the single most important thing,” Million says of writing new material. “When you can go out and record a new album and play those songs [in concert] and fit them into songs from many years ago in that way, it tends to put the older songs in a different light.” – [WBUR}
The Feelies seem to tour in little weekend spurts, one of which just happened. They played Cambridge, MA on Friday (9/19), Jersey City’s WFMU Monty Hall on Saturday (9/19) and New Windsor, NY’s Storm King Art Center on Sunday (9/20). We caught the Monty Hall show where, as usual, Bill Million, Glenn Mercer and the rest of the band gave fans their money’s worth with two full sets, and a couple cover-fueled encores. Setlist and pictures are in this post.
As mentioned in the quoted article above, The Feelies are gearing up to record a new album, so that is something to look forward to. In the meantime, Glenn Mercer has a new all-instrumental solo album, titled Incidental Hum, which will be out October 9 via Bar None. Here’s what Mercer says about it:
My idea for the Incidental Hum was to try to create music that would evoke an atmosphere that would, in turn, suggest images of a more specific location. I would, as an experiment, picture in my mind a scene with a particular environment and then write music to match the mood and place. Once the concept came together, I also allowed for influences from other movie soundtracks like cheesy B horror films, spaghetti westerns and teenage surf flicks.
In other related news, It was a pretty legendary week at Monty Hall with the Thurston Moore Band playing the space on September 17, as you may have seen on the BV Instagram. More pics from The Feelies at Monty Hall, below…
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Set 1-
Morning Comes
Pass the Time
It’s Only Life
Change Your Mind
Invitation
Again Today
Undertow
Nobody Knows
Should Be Gone
The High Road
On the Roof
Original Love
Set 2-
On and On
Deep Fascination
Let’s Go
Gone Gone Gone
The Good Earth
Higher Ground
The Final Word
Way Down
Away
Slipping (Into Something)
Doin’ It Again
Time Is Right
Too Far Gone
Raised Eyebrows
Crazy Rhythms
Encore:
Astral Plane (The Modern Lovers cover)
Paint It Black (The Rolling Stones cover)
I Can’t Stand It (The Velvet Underground cover)
Encore 2:
Seven Days (Ron Wood cover)
Fa Ce-La
