"All that stuff I couldn't do on the viola I'm doing now. After all that time when people were just not interested in hearing the instrument, I'm pursuing it."John Cale
Solo albums
Music For A New Society
About this album
Released in September 1982. ZE ILPS 7019.
Tracks:
- Taking Your Life In Your Hands
- Thoughtless Kind
- Sanities
- If You Were Still Around
- (I Keep) A Close Watch / Mama's Song
- Broken Bird
- Chinese Envoy
- Changes Made
- Damn Life
- Risé, Sam And Rimsky-Korsakov
- In The Library of Force (CD reissue bonus track)
"On Music For A New Society, I wanted to do a Marble Index - put the songs down, then write independent arrangements around them, it´s an arranger's record, it even goes outside the realm of that, it's like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The whole thing is hooked on the voice, which I was really proud of; the voice is sticking out there, it's not hidden. There were some examples where songs ended up so emaciated the weren't songs anymore. There was a purist notion of what it was supposed to be, but it flowered into something entirely different, with a lot of overdubbings. The only track with a band on the whole album is Changes Made and that shouldn't be there, but the record company insisted on it."
Includes a new version of Close Watch, from the Helen Of Troy album.
In The Library of Force is included on the expanded 1993 CD re-issue.
Sanctus > Santies > Sanities + misquotes
The engineer misread Cale's handwritten title and thus the tracks was named Santies on the LP track listing. The CD reissue calls it Sanities.
A part of the final lines of the song - "All so that it would be a stronger world / A strong though loving world / To die in" were misquoted by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in their Watchmen comic, on a full page and the final panel of the comic's twelfth issue (October 1987). Fictional anti-villain Adrian Veidt got it wrong again - "I envision a stronger, loving world" - in the fifth episode of the Watchmen television series in 2019.
What happened to Mama's Song?
The original LP contained Mama's Song, an 0:58 instrumental, as the sixth track of side one. This is not missing from the CD reissue, but included in Close Watch, which now runs for 3:09 (2:11 on the LP).
The original Mama's Song however, featured a telephone call between John Cale and his mother. She had sung the Welsh traditional Ar Lan y Môr (On The Sea Shore). When she was taken ill, Cale decided not to include it on the album.
Music For A New Society + M:FANS 2016 reissue
The album is re-released in expanded format in 2016. See Music For A New Society + M:FANS for all the details.
All songs written by John Cale, except If You Were Still Around and Risé, Sam And Rimsky-Korsakov by John Cale and Sam Shepard, and Damn Life by John Cale and Risé Cale.
Musicians:
John Cale: vocals, guitars, keyboards
Alan Lanier: guitar
D.J. Young: guitar
David Lichtenstein: drums
John Wonderling: autoharp
Mike McLintock: backing vocals
Pipe Major: bagpipes
Tom Fitzgibbon: bagpipes
Robert Elk: bagpipes
Risé Cale: vocal on Risé, Sam And Rimsky-Korsakov
Other credits:
Recorded and mixed at Sky Line Studios, NYC, USA
Producer: John Cale
Engineer: David Lichtenstein
Assistant engineer: David Young
Cover photo: Betsey Johnson
Design: Rob O'Connor
Close Watch singles
Two singles were released to promote the album.
Close Watch / Close Watch
7 inch 45rpm single. 1982/1983
Contains the Helen 0f Troy and Music For A New Society version
SE/Island 104.876, Germany (1982)
Ze IS 113, UK (1983)
Close Watch / Changes Made
7 inch 45rpm single. Germany 1982.
» Fresh Cale
Order the remastered and expanded Paris 1919 album (2LP, CD) via Domino Records
Order the remastered and expanded The Academy in Peril album (LP, CD) via Domino Records
