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.
Substack
Tribute albums
I thought I’d throw together a mini-series looking at the tribute albums to the AHFoW-related acts, and tribute albums contributed to by the AHFoW-related acts. This post will cover the three tribute albums that fall into the first category and were also released by AHFoW. This post will mostly be a re-hash of the posts I made to the my record collection series so apologies if there’s nothing new for you here! All three tribute albums are available to download for free so, if you haven’t already I’d say you should!
The first time I thought a tribute album might be a good idea was back in 2004:
Decomposing the songs of Galaxie 500 and Luna’
Back in 2004 some discussion on the Galaxie 500 Mailing List turned to the idea of making a fan-tribute album and I volunteered to co-ordinate the efforts. It took a couple of years since the volunteer co-ordinator was a bit rubbish, but this finally saw the light of day some time in 2006!
The project started with grand ambitions but eventually ended up with me burning a bunch of CDRs and laser-printing sleeves and selling them to whoever wanted a copy for $5 including postage. It deserved better. There are a bunch of lovely contributions, some faithful, some interprative, but all made by people who loved what they were doing enough to give it a go.
One of the reasons for the delay was that I wanted to be a part of it and was hoping that some talent would be bestowed upon be by some higher being. Thankfully lost are my efforts at covers of Blue Thunder and I Want Everything!
The album is available to download here and is worth it - it’s lovely to have an album made by friends (even if the internet becoming less social means I’ve lost touch with most of them).
For the later AHFoW tribute albums I had invaluable help from Hannah and John and Miguel that meant they took only months instead of years to see the light of day. A couple of the tracks on Decomposing made it onto other releases:
- Watoo Watoo’s lovely loungey Chinatown was released on their second (I think) album La fuite which can be bought on Bandcamp.
- Ron Harrity’s cover of Cold Night was included as a bonus-track on a better organised tribute album On Fire | 30.
The Apollo Generation, whose cover of This Time Around was included on the release, put out an album a few years ago that I’ve only just come across and is being played right now and is sounding good!
I just noticed that the sleeve in my copy was on second-hand paper… that’s how cheap/rubbish I was!
This of course is another entry that doesn’t pass the criteria for inclusion but since it was a child of the Galaxie 500 Mailing List it seemed a shame not to include it. I wrote about the mailing list in a Substack post last year - you can read it for free (as all my Substack posts are).
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/091
- Artist: Various artists
- Title: Decomposing the songs of Galaxie 500 and Luna
- Format: CDR
- Download for free
I published a fanzine to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Galaxie 500’s first show - this was quite a success so I thought I’d do the same for the 30th anniversary of On Fire:
On Fire | 30
In October 2019 Galaxie 500’s masterpiece On Fire reached 30 years of age. At the beginning of May that year I came up with a half-arsed plan to commemorate this - over the next few months, and mainly because of other people - that half-arsed idea turned into On Fire | 30.
The original idea was to create a fanzine, with a piece of art to represent each song on the album - I suggested a pretty loose definition of art to try and encourage participation and there was a little interest although not as much as I’d hoped. However Miguel got in touch shortly after my call for contributions and suggested that we expand this to include an album with bands doing cover versions of each track. So, the short turn-around to produce a fanzine became a short turn-around to produce a fanzine and an album.
My first thought was to release the music on a cassette as it would have been cheaper and a little more quirky, but eventually opted for CD as something more useful (who actually regularly uses cassettes these days?) and, I was hoping, cheaper to post although this may not have been the case.
The whole thing wouldn’t have happened but for the contributions of lots of people but most importantly these three:
- On Fire | 30 wouldn’t have had music without Miguel, he rounded up most of the artists including a couple of coups in Britta for one track, and Robert Scott (of The Bats) for another!
- John designed the beautiful artwork on the book and disc, and prepped it all for printing.
- Hannah did a fine job of coralling everything, arranging for the book printing and the cd pressing. She also came round and stuffed envelopes when it came to sending things out.
Contributors were “paid” in copies of the finished article.
On Fire | 30 was released in two formats - a deluxe edition that included the booklet with badges, photos, postcards and the disc - I also randomly included horrendous, messy, limited-edition lino-cut print, and a standard edition CD only for folk who just wanted the music - this turned out to be a mistake since nobody wanted just the CD - I still have a few kicking around, I sometimes leave them at gigs just to get rid of a few!
The copies with booklets however sold out fairly quickly, so here is a PDF of the booklet.
I hosted a listening party on Twitter on release day, although suspect it was just me listening - here’s what I tweeted.
You can still listen to and buy (for pay what you want) the album on Bandcamp or buy the CD, although shipping costs are ridiculous at the moment so maybe get in touch with me if you want to negotiate a trade or a deal!
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/157
- Artist: Various
- Title: On Fire | 30
- Notes:
- Packaging: CD packaged to look like a single!
- Format: CD/booklet
- Buy ‘On Fire | 30’ on Bandcamp
https://aheadfullofwishes.bandcamp.com/album/on-fire-30
That turned out rather well and with the addition of COVID making 2020 a bit of a nightmare I decided to do it again for the 30th anniversary of This Is Our Music:
This Music Is Ours (CDr & booklet)
This Music Is Ours was the second (and so far last) tribute album put out by A Head Full of Wishes - this was to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Galaxie 500’s third album This Is Our Music five years ago.
The tribute album for On Fire, On Fire | 30 in 2019 had turned out better than I thought possible, and that was almost entirely down to other people who I leaned on rather heavily to get it done, in particular Hannah, who basically project-managed the physical product, and John who took everything I threw at him and handed back the lovely book and sleeve that the release came in.
I was reluctant to throw more work their way so I wasn’t going to bother with a This Is Our Music tribute… but then COVID and the shit-show of 2020 wore me down and so in August I decided to go for it. Both Hannah and John got back in touch as soon as I put out the call and offered their services again - and one of the key reasons that This Music Is Ours exists is down to them.
With the planned release date to be early October, to match This Is Our Music, it gave all the contributors some pretty tight deadlines to work with but they all, without exception, pulled through.
Here are a few random notes about the release:
- The album was originally going to be called Swells like the ocean - a lyric from Hearing Voices.
The album got its final name from the last sentence of the introduction to the book. I must admit to being quite proud of that introduction:
Galaxie 500 called their third album This Is Our Music. Which I suppose it was.
Within six months of its release the band had split up.
Maybe you can hear the end of the band on the album, but I never could. Maybe “way up high and going too fast” or “seems like everything is business” should have clued me in but I was never so astute.
All I heard was the band I loved still progressing, not necessarily getting better, or worse, but getting on.
When you have three near-perfect albums the very idea of ranking or rating them is ridiculous. But the internet loves a list, and music publications love a score, and when that happens with Galaxie 500 it’s This Is Our Music that invariably props up the list, and has the fewest stars.
But then you look at the track listing and you have to wonder how that can be. This is the album with Fourth of July, and Hearing Voices, and Summertime, and Listen, the Snow is Falling. It’s inconceivable that an album this strong could be anything but top of any list.
When Dean says that “half of it is good” or Kramer suggests that “it could have been twice as good” I think that they’re hearing more than the album. I think they’re hearing the making of the album, the friction, the frustration, the anger and impatience. Maybe they can hear the end of the band. I don’t hear that.
Perhaps the album’s title isn’t being said by the band - maybe it’s being said by us.
This music is ours.
This Music Is Ours introduction
-
While only two of the pieces of art were credited to me I was actually responsible for more of them. Getting folk to make music wasn’t as hard as getting folk to contribute art - even if my definition of “art” was as loose as possible, So I filled all the gaps.
-
Sean Eden of Luna appeared on two separate tracks on the album.
-
The booklet has a reproduction of a polaroid that had been taken at (and pinned to the wall in) the Covent Garden Rough Trade shop.
- Dean showed off the copy I sent to him during one of their COVID live streams.
-
It’s a fantastic album - and you can get it for pay what you like on Bandcamp. Unlike On Fire | 30 I didn’t make the mistake of producing too many physical copies of the CD, so they all sold out. If anyone however does want a CD copy of the also brilliant On Fire | 30 give me a shout because I still have quite a few of them!
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/159
- Artist: Various artists
- Title: This Music Is Ours
- Notes: Tribute album
- Packaging: CDr / booklet / postcards / badges / stickers
- Format: CD
- Buy ‘This Music Is Ours’ on Bandcamp
https://aheadfullofwishes.bandcamp.com/album/this-music-is-ours
Annoyingly I never got around to doing a Today tribute album. although the 40th anniversary of that beauty is not so far off now!