Acclaimed Australian guitarist, 3-time ARIA winner, singer-songwriter and producer, Jeff Lang, today releases the first single from his forthcoming album.
Seek High with John Butler is the brand-new song lifted from the forthcoming album, More Life, which will be released on Friday 13thSeptember.
The Australian roots visionary has held an extraordinary career spanning three decades, over 32 albums, three ARIA Awards, a book (now in its second printing) and inclusion in the National Film and Sound Archives. His recordings and live performances have moved audiences across the globe from Japan to Geelong. New Delhi to Newcastle. His work, while based in the “roots” genre transcends and defies categorisation as evidenced in the diversity of the upcoming album, More Life.
More Life is the culmination of a few years of work, beginning with the concept of an album of songs co-written by Lang and some of his favourite artists.
Says Jeff Lang “Seek High is the first single from my new album More Life , a duet with my friend John Butler. John and I wrote this song together a few years back when I was first thinking about putting together what ended up being the More Life album, and we sat on the song until things started coming together for this project before we recorded it. I really enjoyed discovering how our two voices blended in harmony, as well as contrasting when singing on our own sections.
He then went on to say “Instrumentally, Seek High features John playing amplified banjo alongside my electric lap steel, which we recorded together with my lead vocal, live off the floor at Head Gap Studios alongside the hypnotic groove of Danny McKenna on drums. John then added his vocals, a synth bass part and I put on a bass part of my own, using a Danelectro longhorn bass. Having two different types of bass made for some effective shifts in the feel of the track between sections, sometimes moving from the bass guitar to the synth bass or vice-versa, eventually having them both at once when the track started building up steam.”
Not content with merely(!) supplying the perfect balance of moodiness and propulsion in the song’s groove on the drums, Danny McKenna also created the video for this song using a “flipbook” type of computer animation technique.
The album More Life features songs Jeff Lang co-wrote and performed with: John Butler, Liz Stringer, Don Walker, Fred Leone, Kerri Simpson, William Crighton, Suzannah Espie, Hat Fitz & Cara and Asin Khan Langa, and includes guest appearances from Bassekou Kouyate and Debashish Bhattacharya.
More life comes as both a CD and a deluxe double gatefold vinyl album with artwork by iconic US cartoonist, Jim Woodring.