Album Notes

Eric Andersen follows his critically-acclaimed album "Memory of the Future" with "You Can't Relive the Past," an album that explores the breath and depth of Eric's musical talents. He travels in new musical directions on this CD, which integrates the best of Eric's classic soulfulness and poetic unease with the Mississippi blues of Super Chikan and Sam Carr, the NY edge of Lou Reed and the folk/country heart of Townes Van Zandt.

The CD's title track is an acoustic folk/blues/rap between Andersen and Reed, four songs were co-written with the late country/folk master Townes Van Zandt, and most other songs are drenched in north Mississippi blues.

Although he arrived in New York's Greenwich Village during the urban folk explosion of the early '60s, song poet Eric Andersen's personal, introspective compositions steered clear of topical protest and traditional folk songs, setting the template for the singer-songwriter movement that blossomed later in the decade and still flourishes today. The late Robert Shelton presciently described one of Eric's earliest compositions as "typical of the new language and poetic patterns of what will one day be called 'an Eric Andersen song'."

The distinctive qualities of "an Eric Andersen song" have been recognized for almost 40 years by music fans and fellow musicians - Eric has recorded more than 20
albums of original material, and his songs have been covered by artists including Judy Collins, Fairport Convention, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Grateful Dead, Linda
Ronstadt, Rick Nelson and many more.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1943, Andersen grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., where he taught himself to play guitar and piano. As a teenager, he formed folk groups and immersed himself in the writings of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and "Beat Generation" writers and poets. Eric hitchhiked west to San Francisco in 1963 to seek his Beat idols and started performing original songs in local coffeehouses. An encounter with the Beats on the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination inspired his cinematic 26-minute song epic, "Beat Avenue," the title track of his 2003 double-CD. The rootless freedom of life on the road and the experience of mingling with the Beats were to become major forces on his life and work.

"Discovered" by Tom Paxton in a Bay Area coffeehouse, Andersen returned to New York City at his urging. By the spring of '64, Eric was playing clubs in the
Village, creating and recording some of his best-known songs - "Violets of Dawn," "Thirsty Boots" and "Come to My Bedside." Andersen's career suffered a
heartbreaking near-miss in 1967 when a potential signing to Beatles' manager Brian Epstein's roster collapsed with Epstein's death.

Ensuing decades found the peripatetic Andersen playing concerts and festivals around the world and recording a series of major-label albums.

Eric's closest encounter with a wide, non-folk audience came in 1972 with the release of his "Blue River" album on Columbia, his best-selling record to date, which
was subsequently tagged as "the best example of the '70s singer-songwriter movement" by the Rolling Stone Record Guide. Cruelly, the tapes for the follow-up "Stages" album that would have consolidated Eric's growing audience were mysteriously "lost" by the label. Belatedly found and issued in remastered and augmented form in 1991 as "Stages: The Lost Album," the album won the New York Music Award as "Best Folk Album of the Year" and was called "a masterwork" in Rolling Stone.

The last half of the '70s saw Eric releasing two albums on Arista and performing at a few of Bob Dylan's all-star Rolling Thunder Revue shows before recording several records issued primarily in Europe.

Andersen's first major American release in more than a decade came in 1989 with "Ghosts Upon the Road," which garnered New York Music Awards for "Best
Contemporary Folk Album" and "Best Contemporary Folk Performer."

In the early '90s came a new musical partnership for Eric with The Band's vocalist-bassist Rick Danko and Norwegian singer-songwriter Jonas Fjeld. The trio recorded two albums; their self-titled, award-winning debut was reissued by Appleseed with a bonus live disc in 2002 as "One More Shot."

In 1999, Appleseed issued Eric's first new solo album in ten years, "Memory of the Future," and its blues-drenched follow-up, "You Can't Relive the Past," in 2000.

Andersen continued his genre-defying creative evolution with 2003's "Beat Avenue," which featured a rock-oriented approach on some songs and presented the 15-years-in-gestation title track, a blend of spoken vocals, sound effects and jazz/funk backing.