Here we have a brand new track from the one and only King Tuff! He also has a little something to say about it:

“I’m Free” is a song I wrote a few years back which first appeared on Ty Segall’s album Freedom’s Goblin. Ty had asked me to write a song for him to record and I had this little demo laying around which I gave to him. I never really thought about it much after that but recently I was asked if I would ever release my own version of the song… so here it is! My favorite time to write songs has always been in the middle of the night. The world slows down and the little nocturnal critters start hooting, howling, buzzing, bubbling… there’s just different ideas that float around that you can’t catch during the day. This is a small song about that. The crickets and raindrops you hear towards the end of the song were recorded one night in June in Vermont outside of a witches hut.”

Listen here, too:  Spotify | Apple Music

Sub Pop has signed Man Man to a worldwide deal and will release Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between on CD/2xLP/CS/DL worldwide on May 1st, 2020.  You can now watch the new lyric video for “Cloud Nein,” the album’s ebullient first offering, which is available now at all DSPs. Honus Honus, who directed the visual, says of the track, “Life is short. Dance, be merry.”

The 17-track effort also features “Future Peg,” “On the Mend” “Sheela,” and “Animal Attraction,” was produced by Cyrus Ghahremani, mixed by S. Husky Höskulds (Tom Waits, Solomon Burke, Bettye LaVette, Allen Toussaint), and mastered by Dave Cooley (Blood Orange, M83, DIIV, Paramore, Snail Mail, clipping). Dream Hunting…also includes guest vocals from Steady Holiday’s Dre Babinski on “Future Peg” and “If Only,” and Rebecca Black (singer of the viral pop hit, “Friday”) on “On The Mend” and “Lonely Beuys.” The album follows the release of “Beached” and “Witch,“ Man Man’s contributions to Vol. 4 of the Sub Pop Singles Club in 2019.

Man Man will tour extensively in 2020 in support of Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between. Live dates will be announced soon. 
 
Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between is now available for preorder from Sub Pop.

[Album art credit: Petecia Le Fawnhawk]

Man Man
Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between

Tracklisting:
1. Dreamers
2. Cloud Nein
3. On the Mend
4. Lonely Beuys
5. Future Peg
6. Goat
7. Inner Iggy
8. Hunters
9. Oyster Point
10. The Prettiest Song in the World
11. Animal Attraction
12. Sheela
13. Unsweet Meat
14. Swan
15. Powder My Wig
16. If Only
17. In the Valley of the In-Between

LP purchases through megamart.subpop.com and select independent retailers in North America will received the limited Loser edition on white vinyl with a pinkish swirl (while supplies last). Meanwhile, preorders through select independent retailers in the U.K. and Europe will receive the limited Loser edition on pink vinyl (also, while supplies last). There will also be a new T-shirt design available.

[Photo credit: Dan Monick]

About Man Man’s Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between:
Honus Honus (aka Ryan Kattner) has devoted his career to exploring the uncertainty between life’s extremes: beauty and ugliness, order and chaos. The songs on Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between, Man Man’s first album in over six years and his Sub Pop debut, are as intimate, soulful, and timeless as they are audaciously inventive and daring.

At the end of 2015, Man Man went on an unexpected and unforeseen hiatus, and thus began a period of creative reinvention for Honus. He worked in music supervision and on scores (The Exorcist, Superdeluxe, Do You Want to See a Dead Body?). He acted in the indie film Woe (“I played a park ranger, a nice guy in a sad movie.”), So It Goes, a short musical film with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and starred in the award-winning tour documentary Use Your Delusion. He also developed an animated series, wrote film scripts, a graphic novel, a neo-noir TV pilot, and briefly penned a music column for The Talkhouse all while continuing to work on new music, such as an unreleased kids’ record, another Mister Heavenly album, a self-released Honus Honus record, and a conceptual art/noise project Mega Naturals. He was sleeping 2.5 hours per day.

In the midst of this Man Man sabbatical, Honus began piecing together what would become Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between. He recruited longtime-creative collaborator Ghahremani to help him produce. Written in a friend’s LA “guesthouse” (more shack than chic) that had “an old upright piano, a thrift store lamp, and nothing else,” it was an arduous, three-and-a-half-year process, “I had chord progression notes that looked like chicken scratch and lyrics on pieces of paper stuck all over the walls. It looked like I was about to break the big case, catch the killer,” he says, laughing. “One of the best things about this time, in these ‘lost in the wilderness/surreal exile from my own band’ years, was that I finally found players who believed in me, trusted my vision, respected my songwriting. It was rejuvenating.”

Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between opens with “Dreamers,” an ethereal instrumental that soon takes a dark turn into the 20 seconds of cacophony that introduces “Cloud Nein.” An exercise in orchestral-pop storytelling tinted by wry cynicism, it features lyrics such as, “All your dreams crash and burn, and fall to the ground. When they’re made of sweet nothings ’cause nothing sticks around.” Says Honus: “I was writing a song about someone else, but also myself, in a sense. You have to keep changing, evolving in order to survive, appreciate what you have while you have it because there are no guarantees it’ll stick around forever. AKA, life.”

He would find inspiration everywhere. “If Only,” featuring feather-light vocals from Steady Holiday’s Dre Babinski, came to him in a dream. “I first heard ‘If Only’ sung in an R&B Jackie Wilson kind of way,” he says of the haunting piano lullaby. The glitched-out fever dream “Oyster Point” opens with a recording of 8-year-old Honus singing to his newborn brother and named after the town where the frontman and his bandmates met someone who tried to sell them a broken bass clarinet. An ex, bitten by a goat and worried she’d contracted salmonella (true story!), inspired the off-kilter jazz narrative “Goat.” (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well!) In the opening seconds of “Goat” you can actually hear the first time Honus presented the song to his band —an iPhone recording of his drummer playfully teasing, in classic 80s movie tone, “Don’t fuck this up. This is a big gig,” before launching seamlessly into the studio version. “I was taking songs out under the guise of my solo band,” he explains, “so we could test the waters, see what worked live, what didn’t, and then I’d adjust accordingly. When it came time to finally record, we did everything at Cy’s studio but after a year or so of tracking, I didn’t like how ‘in the box’ and stiff everything felt so we booked out a short tour with the sole intention of rolling back and recutting everything together live in a larger studio space. In two frantic tracking days. It was crucial to me that this album feels like a band playing together in a room, communicating with each other, breathing, organic, slithery, alive.”

This lust for life, gloriously unhinged at times, beats strongly throughout. The “Inner Iggy,” all staccato Pinocchio Pleasure Island vibes, pays obeisance to the punk singer as a one-man tsunami. Joseph Beuys, the conceptual artist famous for cohabitating with a coyote at a gallery, stands at the center of the full-throated “Lonely Beuys.” Meanwhile, “Sheela,” a pop-fuzz update on doo-wop, is a love song to the cult attaché at the center of Wild Wild Country. “I watched that documentary, and she terrified me,” he says. “But weeks later, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I loved how strong and powerful and determined a person she was.” The devil is in the details, which is why they affected coyote howls to honor the hell-raiser.

“I started Man Man because I saw Holy Mountain when I was 22. It blew my mind. I had never been in a band or played music before, but I knew I needed to make songs that sounded like that movie felt,” he says. “When I was hunkering down to write, there was a lot of self-doubt, fighting the urge to throw in the towel. It was unavoidable but I had to dive headlong into these fears and twist them into something that wasn’t dominated by them. I’m not gonna lie, it fucking sucked, but it definitely forced the best album of my career out of me. Sometimes you have to tear it all down to build it back up the right way.”

Kattner caught the killer. He is currently sleeping 3.5 hours per day. Hope reigns.

Spring tour dates announced including SXSW. Uneasy Laughter is out March 20th.

I made the music video in my bedroom a couple weeks ago. It’s a psychedelic depiction of an imaginary romance. It’s inspired by early experimental animations like Belladonna of Sadness and Heavy Metal. Both the song and the video are perfect for everyone feeling like shit this Valentine’s Day.”

Uneasy Laughter is available for pre-order and due March 20th via Sub Pop.

[Album Art Credit: Aaron Jupin]

Last month the band announced Uneasy Laughter with the album’s opener and lead single, ”Ego,” which garnered praise from Stereogum, Paste Magazine, MTV, Under The Radar, Brooklyn Vegan, and more.

Moaning Tour Dates + Ticket Links

Additionally, Moaning have announced a spring tour that includes a free hometown show in Los Angeles presented by Doc Martens, a stop at Austin, TX’s SXSW Music Festival, and a run in support of Black Marble.

2/13 - Los Angeles, CA @ Moon Room ^

3/16-21 - Austin, TX @ SXSW
4/7 - San Francisco, CA @ Slim’s *

4/9 - Seattle, WA @ Chop Suey *

4/10 - Vancouver, BC @ Biltmore Cabaret *

4/11 - Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom *

4/13 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge *

4/14 - Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theater *

4/16 - Austin, TX @ Barracuda *

4/17 - Houston, TX @ The Satellite *

4/18 - Dallas, TX @ Deep Ellum Art Company *

4/20 - Albuqueruqe, NM @ Sister *

4/21 - Phoenix, AZ @ Rebel Lounge *

4/22-23 - San Diego, CA @ The Casbah *

5/7 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Regent *

^ Free show presented by Doc Martens

* w/ Black Marble

[Photo Credit: Michael Schmelling]

[Calexico and Iron & Wine photo credit: Piper Ferguson]

Kicks off June 10th and includes appearances at Red Rocks with Neko Case and The Hollywood Bowl with Mandolin Orange JOSEPH to open the first leg of Tour.

Calexico and Iron & Wine are teaming up with Andrew Bird for The Great Summer Stroll tour this June. The coast to coast co-headline tour kicks off in Iron & Wine’s home state of North Carolina and includes stops at Red Rocks Amphitheatre with Neko Case, in Andrew’s home state of Illinois at the Ravinia Festival, and culminates at The Hollywood Bowl where Mandolin Orange joins the evening’s proceedings. JOSEPH will open dates on the first half of the tour.

[Andrew Bird photo credit: Michael Schmelling]

Crossing paths at numerous festivals, sharing touring personnel, and being fans of each other’s work, a long-standing friendship has existed between Andrew Bird, Calexico and Iron & Wine over the years. The three acts first shared a bill in Boston last fall where the idea of a co-headline tour arose. As the year came to a close and with the lines of communication fresh, The Great Summer Stroll tour fell into place.

All three artists have earned praise and critical acclaim for their recent records. Calexico and Iron & Wine’s collaborative record, Years to Burn [Sub Pop] received two nominations at the 2020 Grammy Awards, the first for Best American Roots Performance and the second for Best Americana Album. Andrew Bird’s latest release, My Finest Work Yet [Loma Vista], received a nomination for Best Folk Album at the 2020 Grammy Awards.

A fan presale for The Great Summer Stroll Tour (select dates) begins Wednesday, February 12th at 10 am local time with tickets on sale to the general public this Friday, February 14th at 10 am (local). Check casadecalexico.com for details.

$1 from each ticket sold will be donated to The Nature Conservancy’s Plant a Billion Trees campaign.

CALEXICO AND IRON & WINE AND ANDREW BIRD CO-HEADLINE TOUR DATES