ERIC ANDERSENS BEAT AVENUE, MIXING BEATS AND BEAT, SLATED FOR FEBRUARY 25 RELEASE ON APPLESEED RECORDINGS

Appleseed Recordings will release Beat Avenue, an unconventional 2-CD set by one of the worlds premier singer-songwriters, Eric Andersen, on February 25, 2003.

December 9, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ERIC ANDERSENS BEAT AVENUE, MIXING BEATS AND BEAT,
SLATED FOR FEBRUARY 25 RELEASE ON APPLESEED RECORDINGS

NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Appleseed Recordings will release Beat Avenue, an unconventional 2-CD set by one of the worlds premier singer-songwriters, Eric Andersen, on February 25, 2003. This release is a high-water mark in a career lasting four decades and more than two dozen albums dating back to the early 60s folk and Beat scenes centered in New Yorks Greenwich Village, Boston/Cambridge, and Berkeley/San Francisco.

Always a distinctive, influential and ever-evolving stylist, Andersen has been friend, inspiration and collaborator with artists ranging from Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Townes Van Zandt and The Bands Rick Danko. Best known for seminal, oft-covered mid-'60s ballads like "Thirsty Boots" and "Violets of Dawn," Eric bolsters the intensity of his passionate, evocative songs with the guitar-driven, drum-powered grooves found on much of Beat Avenue.

The new sets first disc contains 12 new original Andersen compositions encompassing the various musical styles Eric has absorbed, expanded or pioneered. His poetic, sensual lyrics are married to electric and acoustic instrumentation and rock, folk, country and blues-flavored arrangements. There is an apocalyptic urgency that propels songs like "Aint No Time to Bleed," "Rains Are Gonna Come," "Great Pyramid," and "Before Everything Changed," a spooked unease to "Under the Shadows" and "Feel Like Comin Home," and smoldering lust mixed with regret on "Song of You and Me," "Salt On Your Skin" and the howling "Stupid Love." "Shape of a Broken Heart" and "Runaway" exemplify the troubled tenderness of Andersens best ballads.

The second disc contains only two songs, neither remotely fitting the "folk troubadour" tag Erics earliest work inspired and has long since outgrown. The 26-minute title track is, in Erics words, "part of an ongoing personal ritual of trying to stretch and rupture the borders of the usual safe singer-songwriting approaches." The composition "Beat Avenue," which Eric worked on for the past fifteen years, is a hypnotic, cinematic account of a watershed day in world history -- November 22, 1963. Combining spoken and half-sung vocals, programmed musical atmospherics, and real instruments, "Beat Avenue" recounts the day and night of President John F. Kennedys assassination as experienced by the then-20-year-old Andersen, who had hitchhiked to San Francisco earlier that year to mingle with the Beat Movement poets and writers who had set his creative impulses aflame.

On the night of President Kennedys death, Eric attended a poetry reading in the Haight-Ashbury by Beat mainstay Allen Ginsberg, then joined Ginsberg and fellow Beat poets and writers Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, David and Tina Meltzer, and Neal Cassady at a post-reading gathering at Ferlinghettis house in the San Francisco hills. Shock, somber conversation, and marijuana smoke eddied through the building, as did a naked Ginsberg, the ever-amped Cassady, and an impressionable and wide-eyed young Eric.

Erics account of the Beat gathering, the day leading up to it, and the days that followed in the grave new world are set to low-key, atmospheric jazz/blues accompaniment by multi-instrumentalist Robert Aaron (woodwinds, guitars, bass, keyboards, trumpet), a longtime member of hip-hop star Wyclef Jeans band who has also worked with David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, and Mary J. Blige, as well as appearing on Erics last two CDs, Memory of the Future (1999) and You Cant Relive the Past (2000), both issued by Appleseed.

"Beat Avenues" unconventional structure and outpouring of imagery extends Andersens autobiographical song-form experiments on previous compositions "Ghosts Upon the Road," "Trouble in Paris," Memory of the Future," and "No Mans Land."

The kaleidoscopic "Beat Avenue" is followed by "Blue Rockin Chair," an earthy, carnal 12-minute country blues akin to some of the tracks on You Cant Relive the Past that Eric recorded in Mississippi with "real deal" blues musicians associated with the Fat Possum record label.

Accompanying guitarist/keyboardist Eric on the first disc and "Blue Rockin Chair" are such "A-list" musicians as Robert Aaron, former Hooters guitarist Eric Bazilian (who wrote Joan Osbornes hit, "One of Us"), vocalists Phoebe Snow and Lucy Kaplansky, jazz-fusion bassist Mark Egan (Pat Metheny Group, Ornette Coleman), powerhouse drummer Shawn Pelton (of the "Saturday Night Live" houseband and sideman to Shawn Colvin, Billy Joel, and Sheryl Crow), and The Bands Garth Hudson on keyboards, accordion and sax. Other musical contributors include Erics singer-songwriter daughter Sari on duet and supporting vocals, and violinist Joyce Andersen (no relation).

Working within and without traditional song frameworks, wielding a vivid poetic skill, a fearless approach to songwriting, and muscular musical backing, Eric Andersen has created a masterpiece on Beat Avenue that should explode forever the "folksinger" pigeonhole that has confined his popular reputation for too long. He is a unique and enduring artist who has earned a broad and ageless audience.

NOTE: Lyrics to the songs on Beat Avenue can be found on Erics website: http://www.ericandersen.com

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For more information on Eric Andersen, please reply to The Baker/Northrop Media Group:
Meryl Wheeler (718) 624-1370    meryl@bakernorthrop.com
Cary Baker   (818) 986-5200 x 222 cary@bakernorthrop.com

Or Appleseed Recordings:
Alan Edwards (215) 628-4562 Joevinyl@aol.com

For Eric Andersen JPEG art, please go to http://www.bakernorthrop.com/art