Yesterday, Mancunian band elbow announced their ninth studio album, Flying Dream 1.
According to the announcement email from the band, the album was “written remotely in the band’s home studios before coming together at the empty Brighton Theatre Royal to perfect, perform, and record the songs.” And the teaser video captures some of that.
The album’s title is curious, as it evokes the song “Flying Dream 143” from the band’s sophomore album (and the first one I bought), Cast of Thousands. There’s also a track on the album titled “The Seldom Seen Kid,” the title of their fourth album and a line from “Grounds for Divorce,” a song on that album.
Watching the trailer for the album yesterday morning I became emotional and teary; as I wrote on Twitter, “life is strange sometimes.”
It’s like listening to a live version of “Weightless” last summer and being emotionally overwhelmed by it — between being three months into the COVID crisis, leading a reclusive life, not having seen family or friends in close to a year, and dealing with my own health issues, the song found a perfect storm to overwhelm my emotional defenses. So much of Giants of All Sizes, the previous album, where “Weightless” comes from, is so wrapped up for me in dealing with my partial blindness and COVID that I may never be able to separate it from those things.
I’ve not ordered Flying Dream 1 yet, but I will soon. It’s not out until November; I have ten weeks. 🙂
The trailer video reminded me of a video a school made last year for elbow’s “One Day Like This,” their breakthrough song, and then I spent fifteen minutes searching for it until I hit on the right combination of words. I can’t always do that, some things are eternally elusive, but here I did.
There’s a normalcy to the video that feels distant and strange, both joyful and sad. Very creative.
New elbow album, coming in November. With patience, I’ll have learned to solve my Rubik’s Revenge from memory by then, but that’s a tale for another time. 🙂