Califone Unite Past And Future With Roots & Crowns

Experimental folkies Califone have completed their latest album, Roots & Crowns, which will be released on October 10 via Thrill Jockey.

On the label's Califone web page, songwriter Tim Rutili describes the new disc as "uniting where you come from — your roots — with what you strive to be or what you reinvent yourself to become — crowns. At the bottom of these songs are the memories and images you sift through in the process."

The band started recording the follow-up to 2004's Heron King Blues last October and worked on it in chunks at 4Deuces Studio in Chicago with producer and longtime collaborator Brian Deck, in Long Beach, California and Phoenix with Michael Krassner (of the Boxhead Ensemble), and at home in Los Angeles and Chicago until May.

"Some of these songs started as hummed melodies into my cell phone recorder while I was driving," says Rutili. "Others were triggered by overheard conversations, loops brought in from home, field recordings or sounds we made in the studio before the tape was rolling."

If Heron King Blues was the end of one of the quartet's darker cycles, then Roots & Crowns is the dawn after the darkness, suggests Thrill Jockey.

"Before we started to work on the new record," explains Rutili, "I was listening to '[The] Orchids' by Psychic TV on repeat. The song made me want to start writing again."

The band were so inspired by "The Orchids" that they decided to cover it on the new disc.

Thrill Jockey has also just reissued Califone's debut album, Roomsound, which was originally released by Perishable and was hard to find.

Califone will tour in support of Roots & Crowns, but so far they've only scheduled one Canadian date: October 14 at Vancouver's Media Club.

Here are the tracks on Roots & Crowns:
"Pink & Sour”
“Spider's House”
“Sunday Noises”
“The Eye You Lost In The Crusades”
“A Chinese Actor”
“Our Kitten Sees Ghosts”
“Alice Crawley”
“The Orchids”
“Burned By The Christians”
“Black Metal Valentine”
“Rose Petal Ear”
“3 Legged Animals”
“If You Would"