Neil Leyton kicks off the celebrations of his 30th year in music with the release of two Passion d’Flower related tracks in a “double A-side” digital single:
The Farewell Song, recorded at Studio 92 in Toronto, was cut during a break in recording in a Passion d’Flower session for the unfinished Deaf Contessa album. Leyton picked up his guitar, instead of the bass (Neil Leyton played bass in Passion d’Flower) and asked Passion d’Flower’s drummer Devin Stoneham to follow along to a song he had not heard before. “Actually we wrote it on the spot, I did all my parts and then asked Sameer to drop in some spoken word and guitar flourishes and there it was… Norm Barker (Studio 92 engineer) hit record and it was done in one take, plus the overdubs”, recalls Leyton.
The Wretch is also a song that dates back to the same Deaf Contessa Passion d’Flower album sessions, however the Passion d’Flower original remains unreleased to this day. What we have here, available for the first time, is a Neil Leyton cover version of Passion d’Flower’s The Wretch, recorded 10 years later at Acetone Stockholm with Leyton’s Swedish backing band The Ghosts: Micke Ghost, Janne Olson and Tommie Riot. “We tried to cut it for the follow-up album to Betrayal of the Self, working title Insanity of Normality – both Arno Gruen book titles for those keeping track,” Leyton recollects. “We never finished that album, either.”
The single comes out March 12th on Shame Destroyer Records. Cover photo by Ana Isa.
