John Moreland Previews New Album ‘LP5’ With Plainspoken ‘East October’
John Moreland has announced an approximate release date for his forthcoming album, titled LP5. The record, due in February 2020, will feature contributions from Bonnie Whitmore, Will Johnson, and longtime collaborator John Calvin Abney.
According to a recent interview, Moreland recorded the album in Denton, Texas, with Matt Pence as producer.
Moreland also released “East October,” the first offering from his fifth studio record. The mid-tempo ballad features a laid-back groove alongside some plainspoken one-liners that stand among the songwriter’s best: “Looking backwards, all my pictures,” Moreland sings in the song’s opening line, “look like send-ups of stolen scriptures.”
LP5 will arrive three years after Big Bad Luv, which found Moreland reckoning with his reputation as a sadsack songwriter.
“When I heard the sad bastard thing more and more, it came to a point where I felt like a caricature of a real person. It made me really depressed for a little while, where I kind of believed it and put too much stock in that. I felt like it was all I had to offer: just bumming people out. It got really dark,” Moreland told Rolling Stone Country in 2017. “I was a happy person, and then everybody called me a sad person, and then that made me sad. I felt like, ‘Am I just bumming everybody out? Is my art just this one-dimensional, negative thing?’”
After releasing Big Bad Luv on indie powerhouse 4AD, Moreland will be releasing this record via Thirty Tigers.
John Moreland’s LP5 track list:
1. “Harder Dreams”
2. “A Thought Is Just a Passing Train”
3. “East October”
4. “Learning How to Tell Myself the Truth”
5. “Two Stars”
6. “Terrestrial”
7. “In Times Between”
8. “When My Fever Breaks”
9. “I Always Let You Burn Me to the Ground”
10. “For Ichiro”
11. “Let Me Be Understood”