Alison Mosshart Announces Solo Spoken Word Album SOUND WHEEL

Alison Mosshart (The Kills, The Dead Weather) has revealed details of Sound Wheel, her first solo spoken word album and companion piece to her printed collection of paintings, photographs, short stories and poetry, CAR MA. Both are set for release on August 7th on Third Man. CAR MA's first limited edition print run sold out in one day upon release in May 2019. It will now be made widely available for the very first time via Third Man Books. The Special Edition bundle includes both hardcover, signed, limited edition CAR MA book and limited edition vinyl SOUND WHEEL LP, available direct from Third Man only.

Sound Wheel is an album about cars, rock n' roll, and love. It's an album about America, performance, and life on the road. It's an album about fender bender portraiture, story tellin' tire tracks, and the never-ending search for the spirit under the hood.

Mosshart imagines the auto body shop like some other Coney Island. And America's highways - the last great roller coasters. She shows us that the engine on fire is connected to the guitar feeding back since birth. And the sensation of walking on stage and facing an audience is like the laugh before the scream in a car without brakes.

Mosshart ruminates that automobiles- with their doors and mirrors and windows, engines and wheels and radios- portray us. Mirror our need to be in or to exit, our inward reflections and outward visions, our lifetimes of tinkering with the mysterious heart. That which runs until it doesn't.

Throughout history the car has been a symbol of freedom and hopeful adventure. It stands to reason it is also a symbol of our subsequent spinning out... over things we never thought could happen during a song that f'king good with the volume up that f'king loud.

"When I was writing Car Ma, there were some passages I struggled to get right, and I got in the practice of reading them out loud and recording them, to hear and feel where words or sentences were rubbing together wrong. I'd listen back to these recordings and they'd be real informative to me in that way. This tool I was using to help me, started feeling like this whole other angle or art form. And I started thinking it would be interesting to perform/record the whole book, not in a straight up spoken word way, but more like a sound sculpture of characters and voices and miscellaneous cut ups, no rules. After a full month of being obsessed with making the book, I then spent the next month obsessed with recording it. I told Third Man about this and they dug the idea. Due to the time constraints of vinyl, not every bit of writing is recorded, I took liberties with a razor blade on some stuff, and there are a lot of interludes from old tapes I found from old phone conversations I had in the 90's, even a whole monologue where I played a crooked car dealer leaving a very long voicemail to a potential buyer- that does not appear in Car Ma, the book. I was just riffing and it really made me laugh. 'Sound Wheel' is the sonic version of the book, but it's its own animal really. It's not music but there are songs on it, it's not spoken word, but I talk a lot. Of course after ALL THAT writing and then ALL THAT recording, I thought, hmmm well it sure would be fun to make little films for all these sound pieces... and so I started doing that. Car Ma continues to be, for me, exploding out in all directions." - Alison Mosshart

Pre-Orders

Sound Wheel: https://thirdmanstore.com/sound-wheel-standard-black-vinyl

Car Ma (hardcover, signed) + Sound Wheel Special Edition Bundle: https://thirdmanstore.com/car-ma-special-edition

Car Ma Standard Edition (paperback): https://thirdmanstore.com/car-ma-standard-edition

The Standard Edition of CAR MA will be available from bookstores everywhere August 11, 2020.

The announcement of Sound Wheel and the new release of CAR MA follows Mosshart's debut solo singles, "Rise" and "It Ain't Water," which will be featured on a forthcoming 7-inch release on Domino Records, available for pre-order now and set for physical release on July 31.The vinyl release pairs "Rise," her debut solo track recorded for FacebookWatch show Sacred Lies, and "It Ain't Water," both with self-produced videos Mosshart created in quarantine.

Fierce and fiery, a no-nonsense firestarter, Alison Mosshart is hardly a stranger to taking chances. Best known as one-half of acclaimed duo The Kills, when she's not moonlighting as Baby Ruthless, the gnarly lead singer of blues-punk foursome The Dead Weather, Mosshart is a forever moving force. Over the years she's collaborated with everyone from her Dead Weather bandmate Jack White to the Arctic Monkeys, Primal Scream, Gang Of Four, Cage The Elephant, Foo Fighters, James Williamson and Mini Mansions. But her new and boldest move yet finds her embracing her solo bonafides.

For a multi-disciplinary artist like Mosshart - whose paintings have been shown in galleries across the world, and who recently published her first book, CAR MA, a collection of her art, photography and writing that doubles as a love letter to automobiles - working on a variety of projects, now including her own music, is exactly how she likes it. Currently, she is working with Jamie Hince on the next Kills record and dreams of the day in the hopefully not so distant future, (pandemic-willing) when they'll be back on the road with exciting new music to share.

Photo credit: David James Swanson

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