Green Monkey Records is extremely happy to announce the arrival of a brand-new Green Pajamas album, Forever For A Little While. We wholeheartedly recommend this for placement on your short stack of essential listening for the fall of 2022. Very much a follow-up to last year’s, Sunlight Might Weigh Even More, this album again features stunning song-craft steeped in classic Green Pajamas neo-psychedelic production sensibilities. Kicking off with the one-two punch of, “Theme for a World Neurotic,” sampled from a North Korean News broadcast(!) and “Six Minutes in Heaven,” it is immediately evident we are in the classic PJ’s territory of Strung Behind The Sun and All Clues Lead To Meagan’s Bed.
“The last album was influenced by Strung so I was thinking a bit about its follow-up, Meagan’s Bed, when putting this one together,” states Jeff Kelly. “It’s a little more autumnal than Sunlight, which I kind of regard as a mostly sunny record.” Beyond, Meagan’s Bed as influence, Kelly cites, living life during the pandemic, the planets, Persian music, Erik Satie, Japanese films by Akira Kurosawa, and even singer/actress Meiko Kaji’s Female Prisoner, Scorpion, and Lady Snowblood movies. “‘Menthol Woman’ was a song I wrote when I was a teenager. I wanted to record it so I took the original nonsensical lyrics out and turned it into a kinda Meiko Kaji tribute!”
Other songs go way back as well. Someone with a bootleg cassette of one of the band’s earliest live performances might just recognize “I Love the Way You Smile,” and “Under the Martian Sun” was written around the time Jeff was in art school in the late 1970s. Though Jeff performed almost all of the music on this album himself, long-time Green Pajamas, Eric Lichter, Laura Weller, and Joe Ross contribute as songwriters, each singing their own compositions, Eric with three songs and Laura and Joe with one apiece. Which all adds up to a collection of startling depth and variety, a whole double-album’s worth of pop invention laced with 4-string Persian setar, tablas, synthesizers, and Jeff’s trusty Telecaster guitars and Rickenbacker bass. “Those are the kind of records I grew up with and loved so it’s hard not to want to try and put something like that together once in a while,” says Jeff.
He and the Green Pajamas have very much succeeded!
