Elliott Murphy’s 2022 album Wonder has been followed by a “companion piece” of three bonus tracks entitled Wonder-full Bonus Tracks, featuring two new original songs, “Metaphysical Moments” and “Where Are We Going Now”, plus a cover of Leonard Cohen’s well known song “Suzanne”.
“Metaphysical Moments” is a “space morphing rocker”, much of which was written and composed in producer Gaspard Murphy’s studio during a jam – “the chords don’t change – something like “Gloria” – and contains a wealth of cultural references: Yul Brenner (who Murphy met through a girlfriend in the late 70’s), the three brides of the apocalypse, with an emphasis on 1933 – Fay Wray who starred in the original King Kong (1933), Nicole Diver, the heroine of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (written in 1933) and Lost Generation novelist and poet Gertrude Stein (Murphy remembers her cult classic The Biography of Alice B. Toklas (published 1933) and its recipe for hashish brownies).
He continues – “don’t know why I thought about Verna Bloom (great forgotten actress), or the film Medium Cool or Blue Velvet, or why Lou Reed has anything to do with Prince Valiant (a comic book I loved as a kid), but the comparison of Leonard Cohen and Tolstoy, both being king size is obvious. I did sell shirts at Abraham and Straus department store in Hempstead, Long Island one sad Christmas and I do live mostly happily in Paris like famed bluesman Memphis Slim, and long live B.B. King who couldn’t have put it any clearer than he did in “Everyday I Have The Blues”.”
The second original track, “Where Are we Going Now”, is a co-write with Olivier Durand from their many writing sessions for Wonder with a groove created in soundchecks and featuring a lap steel guitar solo by Gaspard Murphy. Murphy says he was thinking back to the “glory days of Abstract Expressionist in 1950’s NYC Soho (when artists could afford to live there) and Jackson Pollock and then later Ken Kesey (LSD pioneer) and his pre-hippy Merry Pranksters…of course, the big question is – “Is God One of Us?”, from the great song (“One of Us”) written by my pal Eric Bazilian and a big hit for Joan Osborne in 1995”.
The cover of “Suzanne” takes advantage of Murphy’s deep dramatic voice, and started as a solo demo recorded solo on Murphy’s iPhone. The Lo-Fi version was abandoned in favour of this newly released track, with Gaspard Murphy on guitar/bass.
There are more outtakes from Wonder in the can but we are reliably informed they are likely to be used as demos for the next album.
Label: Murphyland
Release Date: April 2023
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