Today Tindersticks share details of a new album entitled ‘Distractions’, which is set to be released on February 19th via City Slang. Along with the announcement, they follow December’s Television Personalities cover “You’ll have to scream louder” with a new single, “Man alone (can’t stop the fadin’)”.
The album’s opening track and Tindersticks’ longest song yet, “Man Alone (Can’t Stop the Fadin’)” rides a hypnotic bass pulse with Staples’ mantric vocals layered on top: teasing out the nuances from repetition, it leaves behind conventional song structure to create its own space.
Tindersticks’ Stuart A. Staples comments on the track saying: “This song was always a journey but I wasn’t expecting it to be such a long one. We made a 6 minute version but it felt like it pulled off and stopped half way to its destination. This was the beginning of a long journey in itself, to find the route needed to complete it – probably the biggest challenge a song or piece of music has given us. It was delicate and slippery right up to the final mix, which lasted a week! For me the song has a strange connection to the drum machine, bass guitar and voice combination of ‘Indignant Desert Birds’ – mine and Neils first band when I was 17. It was important to me that the words of the song were not a coherent narrative, but passing thoughts along the way.”
Speaking about the accompanying video he continues: “In the back of a London cab driving through the city at night is a very special space for me. It has a particular kind of aloneness. This fascination grew over hundreds of nights leaving the the studio exhausted at 1am – Ladbroke Grove or St Johns Wood, through the city and over the river to South East London in an almost dream state. Retracing that journey, this film became a way of touching the city and the feeling of being both a part of and apart from it.”
