Secretly Canadian Announces Richard Swift Compilation
4 Hits & A Miss is due out 11/1. Watch the lyric video for "Would You?" below.
Photo by Lance Troxel
Today, Secretly Canadian has announced that they will be pressing a new, career-spanning compilation of Richard Swift’s solo music. 4 Hits & A Miss is due out November 1 digitally, with two LP variants to come later this year. During his lifetime, Swift worked with The Shins, Damien Jurado, Sharon Van Etten, Lonnie Holley, The Arcs, Foxygen and others. The compilation will pull from Swift’s expansive discography, highlighting chapters from Dressed Up For the Letdown, The Atlantic Ocean, Ground Trouble Jaw and, of course, his posthumous final LP, The Hex.
Taking cues from the songbooks of Captain Beefheart and Bo Diddley, Swift was an imaginative, scholarly presence in this century’s pop canon, meshing time-worn melodies with contemporary psychedelia. It’s Vaudevillian, cartoonish and sentimentally splendid. When he was still with us, Swift was the heir apparent to Harry Nilsson; a guy who could settle into a beautiful contrast when surrounded by his interests: funk, blues, doo-wop and soul. Recently, Swift’s Ground Trouble Jaw landed at #6 on our list of the greatest EPs of all time. Of his music, I wrote that Swift transports you “to a place not in the past, but a place that never fully existed to begin with.”
Kevin Morby, a friend and former collaborator of Swift’s, wrote:
““There’s an old boy-scout myth I heard about as a child where, if you put the right person in the middle of the forest, armed with only a Swiss Army knife, they could build you a chapel.
“When I think back on this myth I end up thinking of Richard Swift who, if dropped in the middle of the forest with only a $10 Radio Shack microphone, would somehow construct a studio and within that studio build you a chapel of sound. In fact, he essentially did exactly this at his own National Freedom studio in the middle of the Oregon woods, in a town called Cottage Grove where he recorded countless hours of both his own and other people’s music.
“Those chapels of sound will, and I have witnessed it already, awe and inspire generations to come—in the same way that those stone chapels of early Europe do. Each leaves people bewildered and wondering: how was something so massive and so beautiful constructed with such minimal and archaic tools—and in Richard’s case, so quickly?
