Outer Park returns with “Whole Lotta Orange”
Atlanta, Georgia IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 17, 2021
Wild Orchard Records announces the release of Outer Park’s sophomore album, “Whole Lotta Orange.” On the heels of their late-2019 debut, “1968 (slight return),” the band once again conjures the free-wheeling spirits of early underground FM radio, with a 10-song release that remixes and reimagines that era’s kaleidoscopic blend of rock, jazz, blues, Americana, funk and psychedelic.
The band’s celebration of the work of Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Imogen Heap, Eva Cassidy, Charles Mingus, Jeff Beck and Pink Floyd is enhanced by three original tunes (“Foxy Roxy,” “Make The World Magic Again,” “Paradise Lost”).
As before, these sessions meld the diverse talents and musical experiences of Outer Park’s contingents in New Orleans (James Singleton on bass and trumpet), Orléans, France (Charles Tobermann on keys and guitar), and Atlanta (vocalist Chelsea Austin and guitarist Patrick S. Noonan).
The band is again joined by musical guests and friends from around the world: on drums, from NOLA, jazz powerhouse Jason Marsalis and multi-instrumentalist/composer Justin Peake; Boston-based studio ace Paul Lieberman on flute and saxes; and French musicians Simon Couratier on baritone sax and Franck Chevalier on viola.
Whole Lotta Orange was recorded and mixed in New Orleans’s acclaimed Esplanade Studios by Misha Kachkachishvili, whose clients have included a wide range of innovative and Grammy-winning artists, including Eric Clapton, Dr. John, and Ricki Lee Jones.
Whole Lotta Orange opens with “One Big Love” (an Americana-flavored rocker by Patty Griffin), and transports the listener through a terrain of edgy garage band, elegant piano jazz, perky funk, and folky rock. It closes with Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” which Outer Park has transformed into a melancholy reminiscence on generational failures and successes.
Vocalist Chelsea Austin: “This album is what happens when the ghosts of music’s past, present and future share a late dessert. It’s one-part archeology, one-part alchemy. In Outer Park, we treat the vast subterrane of already-recorded music as an invitation to explore, to experiment, to spiral in… and to dissent.”
Outer Park formed in 2018. Three members – Singleton, Tobermann and Noonan – had played their first gig together fifty years earlier, in 1968, as pre-teens. Their musical adventures in the intervening decades had taken them in different directions. However, at a chance reunion in 2013, they discovered they still had much common ground – as well as a great curiosity about how their musical and life experiences would have reshaped their take on the eclectic sounds that had molded them as young musicians.
Singer Chelsea Austin, a full generation younger, brings a whole new set of influences and points-of-views. Reared by former flower-children, she grew up immersed in the styles and songs of the underground radio era. But her natural feel for that material isn’t burdened with reverence, creating an opening for the infusion of modern sounds, and for the signature Outer Park mash-ups and juxtapositions.
“Whole Lotta Orange” is now available in digital, CD and streaming formats through all the major distribution sites.
With this album completed and the pandemic easing, Outer Park band members are now planning virtual performances to bring the spirits of “Whole Lotta Orange” to their globe-spanning audiences, as well as putting further recording sessions in New Orleans on their calendars. Work on their third album is already well underway, as are individual retrospective releases from Singleton, Tobermann and Noonan.
“Sorry for those of you who got the blue. We got a whole lotta orange, and it was good!”
— Jefferson Airplane vocalist Grace Slick, at Woodstock (August 1969).