Critically acclaimed singer / songwriter Jolie Holland will be re-issuing her studio debut Esconidida, as a limited-edition vinyl-only release via her Cinquefoil Records imprint on January 31. Escondida will come as two 45RPM LPs, pressed on 140 gram vinyl for optimum audio quality. The set was remastered by Adam Gonsalves at Telegraph Audio in Portland, Oregon.
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.
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