Alright alright alright alright!
Around here it’s been a busy few weeks. That is just the nature of the terrifying GREEN MONKEY BEAST. Oh wait. It’s not October yet, just September so scratch that terrifying business.
Let start out with ye olde Green Pajamas shall we? It’s a brand new album, all new , all shiny, all groovy. It’s Forever For A Little While!. We must wholeheartedly recommend this for placement on your short stack of essential listening spins for the fall of 2022. Very much a follow-up to last year’s, Sunlight Might Weigh Even More (both have five words in the title!), this album again features stunning Jeff Kelly song-craft steeped in classic Green Pajamas neo-psychedelic production sensibilities. You know you want that.
IMPORTANT NEWS FLASH: Today is the official release date and oops – as of this morning, we don’t have the discs. We ran into some “technical difficulties” that delayed the manufacturing and expect to have them in later today. This is the first release in 250 or so we have missed having the goods in hand and hopefully it won’t become a habit. For all of you that have pre-ordered, we expect the discs to arrive this afternoon and we will get them out to you in today’s post.
Now back to our regular programming.
Jeff: “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. It’s a little more autumnal than Sunlight, which I kind of regard as a mostly sunny record.” Jeff also cites as influences, 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 PJs, Eric, Laura, and Joe contribute songs, each singing their own compositions.
Jeff has a trippin’ new video for “The Hidden Fortress.”
Add it all up, it’s yet another collection of startling depth and variety, nearly a double-album’s worth of pop invention laced with 4-string Persian setar, tablas, synthesizers, and Jeff’s trusty Telecaster guitars and Rickenbacker bass. It is available on CD and download right now. We expect a somewhat shorter version to be released on vinyl in the new year by our friends in Greece, Sound Effect Records. https://greenmonkeyrecords.bandcamp.com/album/forever-for-a-little-while