Posthumous collection, ‘Stay Around,’ is out April 26.
Because Music has announced the release of Stay Around, a new collection of previously unreleased songs from JJ Cale.
The singer, songwriter and guitarist, who penned “Call Me the Breeze,” a hit for Lynyrd Skynyrd, and “After Midnight” and “Cocaine,” made famous by Eric Clapton, passed away in July 2013 at 74.
The new Stay Around was compiled by Cale’s widow, musician Christine Lakeland Cale, as well as friend and longtime manager Mike Kappus. The album’s debut single, “Chasing You,” can be viewed above.
All of the tracks on Stay Around are previously unreleased, a fact that, according to Kappus, is not unusual considering Cale would reserve outtakes from one album for later release on another.
" 'Roll On,' the title track of Cale’s last studio album, was 34 years old,” Kappus explained. “He would burn me CDs of demos, and one time I said, ‘You’ve got two good albums on here.’ Some of the tracks had detailed information, some of them had nothing. Some songs might be a full band of his buddies, others were him playing everything. These were songs he really did intend to do something with because they were carried to his typical level of production for release.”
The only non-Cale-penned track on the album is Christine Lakeland Cale’s “My Baby Blues,” the first song she and JJ cut as a four-piece combo in Bradley’s Barn studio in 1977, the year they met. A longtime member of his band, Lakeland Cale expressed that the song “brings everything full-circle.”
In compiling Stay Around, Lakeland Cale said, “I wanted to find stuff that was completely unheard to max-out the ‘Cale factor’… using as much that came from John’s ears and fingers and his choices as I could, so I stuck to John’s mixes…You can make things so sterile that you take the human feel out. But John left a lot of that human feel in. He left so much room for interpretation.”
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You can check out the album art and full track list for Stay Around below.
Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.
