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Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Tom Jones tackles wide ranging covers on next release

Tom Jones will release his new album Long Lost Suitcase via S-Curve Records on Dec. 4. The 13-song collection was produced by multi-instrumentalist Ethan Johns. 
 
“Right from the start, Ethan and I were on the same page,” says Jones. “We think the same. I can trust him. Before the first album, he said, ‘I hear something in you that I don’t think has been tapped before. How about we go into a studio, take some musicians, work through some songs, and just do it live, on the fly? I think some great things will happen.’”

Long Lost Suitcase has some players familiar from Jones' previous albums, including drummer Jeremy Stacey (who also plays in Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds), bassist Dave Bronze, and Ethan, who plays guitar or keyboards on most tracks.
 
New to the team was Andy Fairweather Low, a fellow Welshman and peer of Tom’s from the early ’60s R&B scene, who started out in The Amen Corner, and later proved his guitar mastery on tours with Roger Waters and Eric Clapton.

The result is a collection of thirteen newly-recorded songs that include the Celtic hoedown "Honey, Honey" by The Milk Carton Kids, the rollicking R&B tune "I Wish You Would" originally by Billy Boy Arnold and made famous the Yardbirds, a stripped-down version of Willie Nelson's "Opportunity To Cry" and many more.

TOM JONES - “Elvis Presley Blues”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2Xa5RQb7Ls

TOM JONES - “Honey, Honey”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXOSLDMNkeo

As the album went along, Tom would remark that each song felt as if it was written about his own experiences, at a given point in his life. Jones recalls “Ethan said, ‘It’s like a bloody autobiography,' and I said, ‘Well, funny you should say that, because I’m actually working on one at the moment”.

Jones had signed up for his first-ever autobiography with Michael Joseph/Penguin, and from that conversation onwards, the two projects became inextricably entwined. As he spent hours recounting his life story – his upbringing in post-War Pontypridd, his dose of TB aged 12, his first gigs in working men’s clubs, his five decades as an international star – it inevitably called to mind songs which evoked key events and emotional upheavals described therein. Soon, all concerned began to regard the album as a kind of soundtrack to the book – and to Tom’s life. “We tried to make every song important,” says Tom.

Released as a companion soundtrack to coincide with the publication of "Over The Top And Back: The Autobiography," Long Lost Suitcase finds Tom letting rip on the kind of R&B and early rock & roll classics which originally fired his passion to sing some sixty years ago. If anyone has the right, the authority and indeed the equipment to tackle such material in 2015, it is surely the irrepressible Sir Tom Jones.

Track List:

1) Opportunity To Cry (Willie Nelson)
2) Honey, Honey (The Milk Carton Kids)
3) Take My Love (I Want To Give It All To You) (Little Willie John)
4) Bring It On Home (Willie Dixon)
5) Everybody Loves A Train (Los Lobos)
6) Elvis Presley Blues (Gillian Welch)
7) He Was A Friend Of Mine (Dave Van Ronk)
8) Factory Girl (Rolling Stones)
9) I Wish You Would (Billy Boy Arnold)
10) 'Til My Back Ain't Got No Bone (William Bell)
11) Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used To Do? (Hank Williams)
12) Tomorrow Night (Original Song)
13) Raise A Ruckus (Original Song)

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