Three Chords and a Sword: Solo Cover Versions 1988-2021

by Alan Licht

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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Gatefold, limited CD with remastered audio and updated artwork from the original digital self-release. Album features bonus covers by Stooges and an insert with a text-based version of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room” generated by artificial intelligence.

Includes unlimited streaming of Three Chords and a Sword: Solo Cover Versions 1988-2021 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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$12 USD or more
Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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$7 USD or more

1.	Heart of Darkness 05:54	info
2.	Jump 04:25 video	info	buy track
3.	Stable Will 04:40	info
4.	Rocket USA 03:02	info
5.	Tom Violence 07:22	info
6.	Everybody’s Talkin’ 05:16	info
7.	Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie 07:06	info
8.	1970 14:58	info

about

Three Chords and a Sword is a collection of eight cover songs recorded by rock/experimental musician Alan Licht over a span of three decades. Re-imagining both Van Halen’s “Jump” and Sonic Youth’s “Tom Violence” from the perspective of American Primitive guitar soli, employing a chord organ to twist Pere Ubu’s “Heart of Darkness” and Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” into eerie, doom-laden ballads, conjuring the sound of New York’s Suicide with little more than a microphone and patch cord, each song emerges transformed. Even the rarely-heard Bob Dylan spoken word piece “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie” is markedly different from the original as heard in Licht’s voice. Licht’s interpretations echo from a childhood encounter with a Larry Rivers pop art painting drawn from a coloring book of Japanese art, which inspired the album cover.

As Licht explains in the liner notes: “Seeing Rivers copy the copy, which was the outline of the original Japanese painting, and then make his own painting is probably what planted the seed of the approach to covers that I’m taking here; using the bare bones of a song but filling in the details in my own way, and then recording my own version. For this release, I took the image from the original coloring book, and asked Robert Beatty to color it in, instead of Rivers—kind of a cover version of Rivers’ cover version of Kuniyoshi, as invited by the concept of a coloring book to begin with.”

Gatefold, limited CD with remastered audio and updated artwork from the original digital self-release. Album features songs by the above-mentioned artists plus Will Oldham and bonus covers by Stooges and an insert with a text-based version of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room” generated by artificial intelligence.

credits

released October 28, 2022

Alan Licht - vocals, guitar, etc. on 1-7

Chris Corsano - drums on 8
Matthew Heyner - double bass on 8
Tamio Shiraishi - alto sax on 8

Cover coloring by Robert Beatty

Mastered by Keith Fullerton Whitman at Alpha State NYC, and Taylor Deupree at 12k Mastering.

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about

Alan Licht New York, New York

Guitarist from Love Child, the Blue Humans, Run On, Text of Light, Lee Ranaldo & the Dust

www.alanlicht.com
alanlicht.tumblr.com

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