The Bookshop Band - Emerge, Return [Numbered, Red / Black vinyl]

Format: LP, Numbered, red / black vinyl
Catalogue No.: TBB019
Barcode: 5063176038210
Release Date: 28 Jun 2024
Genre: Singer-songwriter

After hearing a set of CDs by The Bookshop Band, Pete Townshend was so taken he messaged the duo and offered to record their next album.  Emerge, Return is the result of this discovery by Townshend, who threw himself into the project – performing on every track, and fans will recognise his musicianship woven throughout. 

Pete Townshend: “I listened to the CDs in my car as I was travelling. I was blown away, completely blown away. I got into the whole Bookshop Band technique, which is just two people making this sound like a symphony orchestra. It's quite extraordinary. Each song was special in its own way. So, I reached out.”

The Bookshop Band began in 2010 as an artistic collaboration between a group of musicians and their local indie bookshop, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. They would read a book, chosen by the bookshop, then write two songs inspired by it - a reader’s response - to be performed to the author and a tiny audience, crammed in above the shop. 

They have so far existed largely off-grid, occupying a creative space between the music and book worlds, writing songs inspired by books and bringing them, through music, to a new audience. They have written and recorded 13 albums and performed in hundreds of bookshops. 
Emerge, Return marks the band’s first album to have a wider commercial release and will come out, alongside a podcast series of conversations with the authors, during Independent Bookshop Week (15-22 June). 

The artwork for the cover was created by Stanley Donwood (Radiohead / Glastonbury Festival).
It’s one of the band’s darker albums, responding to themes surrounding the oppression of bodies, free will and free speech, explored in books that include The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and The Book Of Dust, by Philip Pullman. The title comes from their song inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, which glimpses our underworlds and morality in the scale of deep time.

The books were chosen through a number of curations, including the author events at Mr B’s, but also by the V&A Museum, written for their season on banned books, and for the National Portrait Gallery, responding to their exhibition on the Brontë sisters. 

The band will support the release with a full, 70-date UK tour, mostly in indie bookshops, and starting at Glastonbury Festival with a set at Toad Hall.

Tracklist:
Sanctuary (Inspired by The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman)
Dirty Word (Inspired by Brave New World by Aldous Huxley)
Eve in Your Garden (Inspired by The Testaments by Margaret Atwood)
Room for Three (Inspired by The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman)
Faith in Weather (Inspired by The Seven Ravens folk tale)
Deep Time (Inspired by Underland by Robert Macfarlane)
Doll (Inspired by Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch)
Waggons and Wheels (Inspired by Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch)
Why I Travel This Way (Inspired by The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel)
The Night We Came to Wigtown (Inspired by The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell)
The Vanishing Hours (Inspired by The Vanishing Hours by Barney Norris)