Southern & Enlightened - Vinyl LP
This limited-edition Black 12" vinyl is pressed in standard weight, limited to 500 copies. It comes in a gatefold jacket with a gloss finish, designed by Forth+Back. The vinyl includes a colored inner sleeve with photographs by Jacob Cummings and an 11x22 double-sided poster with lyrics. Each record is packaged in a reusable polybag with a choice of three stickers in green, red, or purple.
The album releases on November 8. Vinyl records will be shipped during the week leading up to the release to ensure delivery around the album release date.
The album was pressed at Gotta Groove Records, independently produced and released by Jacob Cummings, and manufactured in the USA. Each record ships in a protective, reinforced cardboard mailer, with worldwide shipping available.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
- If You Can Hear Me, Mom
- Incarnations
- Run Away
- Joan
- I Found Bliss in the Deep End
Side B:
- The Survivor
- Losing A Friend
- Big Ol’ Deer
- We Got Lost on the Way Up
- Forever & Ever, Amen
- Love in the End
Cummings recorded Southern & Enlightened in a home once owned by his grandmother, who passed away shortly before recording. The artist stayed for a month before the house was due to be torn down, going through his grandmother’s affairs and watching Ken Burns’ Baseball. One imagines the memories of the old house and the sadness of its impending destruction seeped into the music—and perhaps some of Burns’ old, weird Americana as well. This is tactile music, alive with the feeling of sea spray, sand against skin, winds blowing through open cabin windows, the textures of old wood and burnished brass.
Though Cummings’ arrangements are kin to LA’s tradition of studio psychedelia, reminiscent of Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle or Brian Wilson’s Smile at its foggiest, there’s a pleasingly Atlantic undertone that’ll appeal to fans of Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, the seashell-eyed music of Real Estate and Beach House. Southern & Enlightened presses into deeply personal territory, dealing with themes of family, eternity and death, yet it makes its impression of melancholy and impermanence as strongly through the lyrics as Cummings’ pitch-perfect understanding of arrangement, spacing and timbre.