WHEN ERIC EARLEY recently unearthed a box of demos he’d made on a four-track cassette recorder in the 1990s, he thought it would be amusing to hear his old songs once again. “I borrowed a four-track cassette deck from a friend and started listening through some old tapes for fun,” the Blitzen Trapper guitarist explains. “These are songs I recorded when I was, like, 19 and 20, a long time before I had a band.”
To his surprise, many of the tunes still held up after so many years. Rather than leave them in the past, he revived and in some cases rewrote the best of them for his band. “I felt some of them were great, so I decided to rework them,” he says. “That also made me want to use the technical limitation of four-track cassette recording as a songwriting tool again. I always enjoyed that when I was young.”
The result of that effort is (Yep Roc), Blitzen Trapper’s new album. In addition to revising various cuts, Earley re-used some of the original cassette tracks and embellished them with additional instruments and vocals. The finished effort in many ways recalls Blitzen Trapper’s most celebrated and popular album, , released by Sub Pop in 2008, when Earley was documenting the “feral existence” of his youth by playing all the instruments and engineering himself on a four-track cassette machine. At the same time, is a very present trip through the past from the perspective of a prodigious indie-folk revivalist and astute life observer who has many more years in the rear-view mirror.
