A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
My record collection
#102: Tanya Donelly - Swan Song Series
Not that I’d consider Tanya Donelly noise but this is possibly the release in this series with the largest signal:noise ratio. It’s a triple album with 31 tracks on, and is here because just one of those tracks - 3’57” of the almost two hours of the album - features Damon and Naomi, as performers and co-writers.
The sleeve notes don’t mention who specifically plays on what - there’s just a great long list of “PLAYERS”, so I thought that there was a chance that Damon and Naomi put in guitar/voice (Damon) and bass/keyboard (Naomi) duty on other tracks.
But the sleeve does say “for liner notes and more info regarding credits, please visit www.tanyadonelly.com” but, currently this site is “under construction” - seriously, if you’re going to put sleeve notes on a website you really HAVE TO keep that content live!
Fortunately we can thank (as we can so often) the Internet Archive’s fantastic Wayback Machine which has the website archived from 2016 and means I can track down more info regarding credits and there is no evidence that Damon or Naomi appeared on any of the other tracks.
So, it looks like it is just that one track, which is the lovely Storm Blown Bird which wasn’t part of the main Swan Song Series but was included as a bonus track in the series. This is how Tanya described the track
Storm Blown Bird (Donelly/Damon Krukowski/Naomi Yang)
- Tanya — guitars and vox
- Damon Krukowski — guitar and vox
- Naomi Yang — bass, keyboards
- Dean Fisher — drums, percussion Recorded and Mixed by Rafi Sofer at Q Division Studios, Somerville MA
I was a Damon and Naomi fan before we became friends, and was nervous and excited to work with them. We share an attraction to winding, non-linear, tempo-mixing music, and this is definitely apparent in this song. The main body was recorded live, with a few overdubs ~ happily old-school, and an extremely fun day. The musicality of these two people is inspiring, and wonderful to experience. A song about running into the night.
The Swan Song Series were a series of five EPs released digitally over time via Bandcamp and featuring a number of well known musical friends, it was then collected into this three LP set which I bought direct from UK distributors Cargo for £30.99 + postage.
The EPs are still available on Bandcamp for name your price: Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, Vol. 4, Vol. 5, Bonus tracks which doesn’t have Damon and Naomi’s contribution.
Or you can pay $12 to buy them collected into one release, that does include Damon and Naomi’s contribution via American Laundromat. I guess you can probably also get the LP and CD versions.
I have to admit that a triple album is an imposing thing to listen to in one sitting, and I probably hadn’t done it until it came to writing this blog post… I’ve been trying to think of the other triple LPs I have, and whether I ever listen to them in one go. A very quick/lazy scan of my shelves found…
- 2 x Cavern of Anti Matter triple LPs - probably listened to them both… once.
- Laurie Spiegel - The Expanding Universe triple LP - actually have listened to this quite a lot… although more often I suspect the Bandcamp download!
- Neil Young - Decade - I’d guess I listened to this quite a lot way back - but not so much recently.
there are definitely more, but suspect they don’t get listened to very often!
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 12/072
- Artist: Tanya Donelly
- Title: Swan Song Series
- Packaging: Tri-fold sleeve
- Format: Triple LP
- Bought from Cargo for £30.99 + £3.07 postage.
- Buy ‘Swan Song Series’ on Bandcamp