Photo by Sean Ono Lennon
Wilco guitarist Nels Cline will release his upcoming solo record Share The Wealth on Nov. 13. Ahead of its release, Cline has shared the second single from the record. The song is a cover of Brazilian composer/singer/guitarist Caetano Veloso cut "Segunda."
Share The Wealth's personnel consists of an "expanded edition" of Cline's project The Nels Cline Singers: Cline himself on guitar, saxophonist Skerik, keyboardist Brian Marsella, bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Scott Amendola. (Quote via press release.)
“The inspiration was from hearing the Gal Costa studio version,” said Cline via press release (referencing the Brazilian singer’s performance of “Segunda” from her 2011 album Recanto). “Yuka [Honda] and I just love that album, which Caetano Veloso produced. I didn't know anything about the lyrics so I asked Cyro's wife, Eleonora Alberto, who offered to translate it. It turns out the lyrics are extremely poetic and timely.
"The song is essentially like a Black Lives Matter anthem," he continued. "It’s about a black Brazilian ruminating on how people think that blacks are lazy and that the light-skinned people are the industrious people. And it incorporates the idea of White Monday, which is a Catholic holiday in Brazil. So Caetano uses this idea of the working man and the holiday and the legacy of black slavery in Brazil as this kind of potent, poetic statement. And Skerik just launches on this one.”
“This band has never even played a live gig together,” Cline added regarding the album's musicians. “So basically, the whole thing was an experiment. We recorded all these jams with the idea that I was going to take tiny fragments of them and create this kind of cut-and-paste, collaged, psychedelic record like an Os Mutantes record or something crazy like that. But when I listened back to these jams, I liked them so much that I wanted to keep them intact. And some of the most startling transitions, they’re not edits. They just happened in the course of these long improvisations in the studio, almost like magic.”
In addition to the single's release, Cline also shared a video for the song. Watch it below, and pre-order Share The Wealth here!
