Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 2 is set for release on 14th April 2023, again via Full Time Hobby. Check out his lead single ‘Kingdom Weather’, featuring Yuma Abe.
Last year, Full Time Hobby released Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection, an album that made quite an impression as the in-demand Nashville-based pedal steel player revealed a musical vision that drew from the past yet managed forge new ground. As Bob Fish said in his album review: “Finding the connection between Fripp and Eno and Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention, Cullum’s has an interesting set of ears. He’s also a fan of the progressive, like King Crimson and Genesis, not to mention Bill Frissell, Can and Neu. Putting that all on one disc in a way that allows listeners to find the connective tissue isn’t easy, yet he does it with the kind of style and grace not often expected of one still in his twenties.”
Cullum path to Nashville as an in-demand session man is quite unexpected. He actually hails from Romford, Essex, which gives him a burr that’s been described as being pitched somewhere between Robert Wyatt and Ray Davies. The crucial link in all this is the legendary English player B. J. Cole who set him on the path he still walks today. After touring with Nashville-based groups and hearing tales of “seasoned Nashville steel players”, the young musician upped sticks and found a “nice little crowd of weirdos” in his chosen city.
Those that loved his last album will be pleased to hear that Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 2 is set for release on 14th April 2023, again via Full Time Hobby with what promises to be another kaleidoscopic collection of folk, jazz, and pop, cut through with immaculately-rendered songwriting.
According to the album press Coin Collection’s modus operandi was “a very quintessential English folk record, but with really good Nashville players”, Cullum says of …Coin Collection 2 that “I wanted to be different. I wanted to try and pull away from wearing my influences on my sleeve… I was trying to pick out ideas that were new to me. You can never escape your musical influences but I wanted them to be more hidden sub-consciously than upfront.” Though you can pick out the odd similarity to other things here and there – The Beach Boys’ Friends LP, perhaps, or The Incredible String Band, or Joni Mitchell – the thing is decidedly Cullum’s own. What’s also reassuring is that there hasn’t been some giant sonic leap from …Coin Collection, rather that the beautifully sun-kissed, English country garden, bees-buzzing-round-lager atmosphere has remained, but complicated, weirded, deepened.
Cullum is not alone on this album; Yuma Abe provides fractured, low-register chorus vocals that accentuate the ever-so-slightly mournful air to ‘Kingdom Weather’, released today as a single, while Dana Gavanski provides beautiful harmony lines in ‘What A Waste Of An Echo’. Despite the number of collaborators and players (also including Rich Ruth, Erin Rae, and Caitlin Rose) things never seem too crowded or brimming with too many ideas. Instead Cullum marshalls each moving party expertly.
Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 2 is out 14th April 2023 and is available to pre-order today on limited edition vinyl, CD and digital: https://fulltimehobby.ffm.to/coincollection2.OPR
Track list
1. What a Waste of an Echo (feat. Dana Gavanski
2. Kingdom Weather (feat. Yuma Abe)
3. Green Trees
4. Out of Focus
5. The Three Magnets (feat. Rich Ruth)
6. Betwixt and Between (feat. Erin Rae)
7. Cold Damp Valley
8. That Same Day Departure (feat. Caitlin Rose)