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
#118: Dean Wareham - Emancipated Hearts (test pressing)
So Dean Wareham’s first LP puts in it’s third, and (I think) final, appearance in this series with this test pressing that Nat of Sonic Cathedral kindly sent me ahead of release. Since in the previous posts I’ve mostly whined on about formats maybe it’s about time to talk a little more about the album.
Love Is Colder Than Death
Named after Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s first feature film… which is on YouTube and I started to watch but it was slow, and grubby and over stylised and derivative of the French New Wave from years earlier. We went and saw his much better The Marriage of Maria Braun at the NFT a few years ago and Hanna Schygulla was interviewed before the screening.
Emancipated Hearts
This has an odd middle section where Dean drifts into Little Drummer Boy so I guess, this makes it a Christmas song.
The Deadliest Day Since the Invasion Began
I’m rather surprised that this isn’t a film title too, but is actually lifted from Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station which I haven’t read but I nabbed the paragraph from Google Books… bcs I could.
Bees were disappearing, maybe because of cell phone radiation, maybe because of perfume, maybe because of candy. It was the deadliest day since the invasion began. Unmanned drones made sorrowful noise overhead. It was 1933. The cities were polluted with light, the world warming. The seas rising. The seas were closing over future readers. Confused trees were blooming early; you could view the pics from space online.
Ben Lerner - Leaving the Atocha Station
The Longest Bridges in the World
The longest bridges in the world (as listed in Wikipedia) I have crossed are…
- The Oresund between Denmark and Sweden (travelling by train between Luna shows).
- Saint-Nazaire Bridge in France
- The Tay Bridge in Scotland
The Ticking is the Bomb
UNCUT described this as a stunned, penumbral beauty close in spirit, perhaps, to his formative work in Galaxie 500 ~ since that quote was lifted from their covermount CD I guess it, in turn, may have been lifted from the press release, it certainly sounds like it. I don’t have the presser to check though.
Air
Air is a cover of a track from Scottish psych-folk band The Incredible String Band. Joe Boyd in his book White Bicylces Joe Boyd writes of the ISB being sucked into Scientology…
The first inkling I had took place after I left the Paradox Restaurant came when the Incredible String Band's US agent telephoned me in LA. Rather than send the tour proceeds to our London bank as agreed, they wanted it all paid in cash. I got through to Licorice, who told me they needed it to pay for Scientology courses. I knew little about the cult but what I had heard wasn't good. When I arrived back in New York I was confronted with a strangely unified foursome: they wanted the money and wanted to give it to the Church of Scientology.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 12/024
- Artist: Dean Wareham
- Title: Emancipated Hearts
- Notes: Test pressing
- Packaging: Plain white sleeve
- Format: 10”
- Buy ‘Emancipated Hearts’ on Bandcamp
Previously in my record collection: