New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Critically acclaimed singer/ songwriter Jolie Holland is releasing ESCONDIDA on vinyl for the first time in honor of its 15 year anniversary. Escondida will be pressed on 140 gram double vinyl at 45rpm for optimum audio quality via her own small-imprint label, Cinquefoil Records. Remastered by Adam Gonsalves at Telegraph Audio in Portland, Oregon. She is currently raising funds to finance the re-issue via an album pre-sales campaign and other offerings hosted on her website.
Aside from the album and regular merch like T-shirts and etc, Holland has some very special offerings including the 72 year-old guitar she played while touring in celebration of Escondida. You can support the reissue by purchasing handwritten lyrics, private command performances, coaching for songwriters, and even by having Jolie call you and tell you one of the hundred or so real ghost stories she has collected since she was a teenager. (Jolie is now working on an illustrated book of these stories with the great illustrator Tony Millionaire.)
Also available are shirts, totes, magnets and postcards that use elements of Escondida's original artwork, including the Lunatic
Tarot deck designed by Stefan Jecusco. Jolie is offering the complete deck to the public for the first time, along with a booklet that explains how to interpret the cards. Check out the campaign perk levels for other promotional offers including a brand new high-quality record player signed by Holland.
"As you know, its expensive to release an album without the help of a major label, so I'm very grateful for your help. THANK YOU from the depths of my heart," she explains.
Upon its original release on the trendsetting Anti label, Escondida created an immediate sensation embraced by NPR and influential music journalists around the globe. It catapulted her from playing for spare change on the street to headlining prestigious venues the world over and would be followed by four more highly praised solo albums.
Escondida was Jolie Holland's first full length studio recording. It was self-produced, engineered by Lemon DeGeorge who had just been nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the documentary Genghis Blues. Most of the sessions were done at In The Pocket recording studio far out in the woods outside of Forrestville, CA; one track was recorded at DeGeorge's Crib Nebula in SF. Sessions moved quickly - a mere four and a half days - due to a tight budget.
Holland and her musical colleagues were a diverse bunch who'd come together in San Francisco. Her regular live band was esteemed jazz drummer
David Mihaly, and guitarist Brian Miller who had a background in eccentric, literary pop groups. They were joined for these recordings by North Bay music vet Keith Cary on upright, aluminum-body bass, mandolin and a 1867-vintage gut-stringed, fretless banjo that'd belonged to his grandfather. Not surprisingly, Keith had played with R. Crumb's Cheap Suit Serenaders!
Some of the songs were brand new, written in the weeks prior to recording, others some were much older dating back to when Jolie was a homeless teenager struggling to get by and finish high school. They were a stylistically diverse mix ranging from the
Chet Baker meets Syd Barrett folk psychedelia of "Black Stars" to the
William Blake-ian prose set to norteño rhythms of "Goodbye California" and ALL points in between: uniformly strikingly original.
The raging success of Escondida was one of the most unlikely, surreal turns in a life lived outside mainstream society from early on. Holland had grown up in
Houston in a very religious family; like a large number of LGBTQ+, she found herself out on the streets because of her emerging sexuality. She survived on the margins for years, living in a house built on the back of a pickup truck, in a shack by a swamp in Louisiana, and illegally camping in a tipi behind a wilderness boundary.
Holland and her companions were grifters, hustlers, dumpster-diving eccentrics to whom serving as pharmaceutical testing subjects seemed like a plausible gig. They were also cultural omnivores taking in the Residents, Mose Allison, Laurie Anderson, Chinese opera, goth bands, Monk, Coltrane, the
Velvet Underground, and scores of tiny groups no one remembers anymore. Among this fellowship they started creating their own art, entertaining, critiquing and encouraging one another.
Eventually Jolie landed in San Francisco, assembled a core trio, started performing songs she'd accumulated during her years as a transient, and writing even more hauntingly powerful new pieces. Her home recordings came to circulate so widely and be held in such high esteem that Anti Records stepped in to officially release them as the Catalpa album. Before Holland was signed, Catalpa was in the top ten on college radios on both coasts, without touring as a solo artist. The stage was set for the creation of Escondida.
