South Atlantic Blues: Vinyl LP

Label: Earth Recordings
Release Date: 9th February

Aww man, don't say an artist could 'be bigger than Elvis', you're just asking them to be one of those Big Star/Rodriguez/Jim Sullivan myths. Luckily for us, maybe not for baroque jazz folk psych pop crooner Scott Fagan, we love a fabled artist whose genius takes years to acknowledge. 'South Atlantic Blues' is a little bit Arthur Lee, a bit Donovan, Kevin Ayers and Bill Fay... just a wonderfully whimsical and beautiful soul. He's also Stephen Merrit's biological father, who he only met a decade ago. GET THAT DOCO MADE!

The long lost 1968 debut album by singer-songwriter, Scott Fagan, once tipped to be bigger than Elvis, is set for release on 9th February 2024 via Earth Recordings. ‘South Atlantic Blues’ will be reissued for the first time in its original artwork, with an iconic portrait of Fagan by famed rock photographer, Joel Brodsky, following a widely celebrated 2015 release.

Revisiting his mystical, mythical, and deeply soulful masterpiece, this psych-folk gem doffs a Tropicalia hat direct from downtown New York. “His songs embrace a broad sonic fantasia, swirling in ’60s New York R&B and ’40s jazz, as well as the Caribbean rhythms of calypso, meringue and Pachanga.” New York Times

Scott Fagan’s story is worthy of a movie in itself. A swinging hipster who landed in 60s Greenwich folk scene, escaping the abject poverty of his U.S. Virgin Islands upbringing, Fagan found himself mentored by the Brill Building’s Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, and feted as the next big thing. “Forget Rodriguez, forget Searching for Sugar Man,” says Sharyn Felder, daughter of the late Doc Pomus, the legendary songwriter who signed Fagan to management in 1964. “Scott was so much more. He was cut from a different cloth.”

‘South Atlantic Blues’ is the perfect soundtrack to this tale, an epic song cycle wrapped around an impassioned love story, driven by Fagan’s dense, allusive lyrics, and production by Elmer Jared Gordon (Pearls Before Swine) and rich arrangements by Horace Ott (Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, The Shirelles). The Earth Recordings reissue coincides with a resurgence in activity for Fagan, with a new album in the works – the never-recorded soundtrack to ‘Soon’, the 1971 Broadway rock musical he co-wrote and starred in – and a documentary ‘Soon: the Story of Scott Fagan’ currently filming through Scissor Kick Films, from director Marah Strauch, writer Chris Campion (who rediscovered the singer-songwriter in 2015), and producer Eric Bruggeman.
 

Track List:

A1. In My Head
A2. Nickels and Dimes
A3. Crying
A4. The Carnival is Ended
A5. South Atlantic Blues

B1. Nothing But Love
B2. Tenement Hall
B3. In Your Hands
B4. Crystal Ball
B5. Madam-moiselle