Mad Season Taps Mark Lanegan for 'Above' Reissue, Unreleased Songs



Grunge supergroup Mad Season will reissue its lone album with a little help from Mark Lanegan.

A three-disc deluxe version of 1995's "Above" will be released April 2 on Legacy Recordings, featuring unfinished material with new vocals and lyrics from the former Screaming Trees frontman among its bonus tracks.

The group included Pearl Jam's Mike McCready, Screaming Trees' Barrett Martin as well as the late Lanye Staley ( Alice in Chains) and John Baker Saunders, who died in 2002 and 1999, respectively. The previously unreleased material stems from sessions for the group's unfinished second album, shelved when Staley's health prevented further work.

Lanegan, a contributor to "Above," was chosen to work on three unfinished tracks: "Locomotive," "Black Book of Fear" and "Slip Away." Bonus tracks on the reissue will also include "Interlude" and a remix of "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier."

The reissue will add "Live at the Moore," a concert CD documenting the band's April 29 Seattle show, and a DVD of the 1995 performance also including the band's New Year's Eve set from later that year.


BILLBOARD.com

Loved Mad Season...will pick this up for the unreleased tracks. as well as the NYE content on the DVD. Bought a Live At The Moore DVD boot a loooooong time ago. (although this will hopefully be an upgrade)

Was hoping it'd be accompanied by a vinyl re-release, but haven't heard mention of that yet.

Nice I hadn't heard of this group before but I like the people involved so I'll probably check out this release.

Day 1 buy for me. I love, love love this album. And I loved, loved, loved Layne. It still bugs me that he is dead.

Thanks for the post! Off to Amazon to pre-order if it is there.

Vinyl is coming on Record Store Day.

Oh wow. Day 1 buy for me. One of the most underrated albums of the last 20 years. Incredible cover to cover. Mood, melodies and Staley's haunting vocals are just unbeatable.

Here's the link for the deluxe edition on amazon. Kinda pricey but hopefully it will go down. I went ahead and pre-ordered it. I've played the album hundreds of times so I will definitely get my money's worth.

http://www.amazon.com/Above-Deluxe-M...rds=mad+season

I agree with both of you. I am excited about this and cannot wait.

$37?! I can't see myself dropping that on an album I casually enjoy. Still, it sounds like a nice little package.

Damn I just saw that myself. I'm interested in the album but $37 for a three disc set seems ridiculous to me. I'll watch the price and hopefully it goes down before release day hits.

I figured I would be safe with their pre-order guarantee. If the price is better elsewhere, I will just cancel the pre-order.

$24.45 from Amazon.ca

http://www.amazon.ca/Above-Mad-Seaso...8129795&sr=8-2

I think twenty dollars is my price point for this.

$24.99 from Ten Club, but no free shipping.

Missed this reply earlier - geat news! Thanks for the heads up!

Never liked the album, too boring. Hopefully my brother will get [I'm sure he will] so I can listen to it again and see how it sounds too me after all this time.

Glad ya excited, it's why I posted the info.

Hopefully this will be done also for TEMPLE OF THE DOG.

From Amazon:

"CD 1 features the original album + an unreleased acoustic instrumental titled "Interlude," 3 new songs from the band's unfinished second album with newly recorded vocals and lyrics by Mark Lanegan and a remixed version of the band's John Lennon cover "I Don't Wanna Be A Soldier.""

what exactly does this mean???

There was some stuff that was being worked on for a 2nd album prior to Layne's passing. They finished these tracks w/Lanegan.

Wow, really? I'm guessing you don't know them by name, but surely you've heard:


Both still get played on the modern rock stations around here.

Big to these guys. One of my favorite albums. I love AiC, but Mad Season was better. Total shame Layne is gone. A proper second album would have been phenomenal.

I think $20 is my limit though. There's nothing wrong with the CD/mp3's I already listen to.

Pearl Jam's Mike McCready says the unexpected new expanded reissue of "Above" from Mad Season, his mid-90's Seattle supergroup alongside Alice in Chains' Layne Staley and Screaming Trees' Barrett Martin, shines with new lyrics from the ex-Trees' singer Mark Lanegan and a guest turn from R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, but that it owes its existence to bittersweet serendipity.

"Eight months ago in our Pearl Jam vaults," McCready tells Billboard he found "tucked away in a corner was this Mad Season live at the Crocodile [in Seattle in 1995] tape. I forgot that we had recorded that, and that was our record release show. I thought, this is pretty good. " He adds that while "it was very painful to listen to it because [Staley and bassist John Baker Saunders] had died" only a few years after it was recorded, "that sparked me."

The three disc "Above" re-issue, due April 2 on Sony's Legacy Recordings (iTunes pre-order available), features the Mad Season's 1995 album, a DVD featuring what drummer Barrett Martin remembers Buck calling the "super heavy blues" group's Dec. 31, 1994 and April 29, 1995 shows at Seattle's RCKNDY and Moore Theater and more, plus five bonus tracks that include three previously unreleased songs with recently penned lyrics and vocals by Lanegan.

The music for "Locomotive," "Black Book of Fear" (co-written by Buck) and "Slip Away," the three songs Lanegan has newly finished, began life during 1996 sessions intended to become a second Mad Season album called "Disinformation" that never came to fruition because Staley and Saunders "were getting hard to get ahold of," says McCready. "You can only try so long before you kind of go, ok we need to move on or figure something else out. We tried hard to get them down but they weren't in any shape."

In 1999 and 2002 respectively, both Saunders and Staley died of heroin overdoses. "'Slip Away,' which I wrote, was kind of my feeling at the time how [Mad Season] was slipping away," McCready says. "The guitar solo at the end of that, you can hear the pain that's in that. That's my pain of how this whole thing was all falling apart when Baker and Layne were dying… Mark put lyrics to that and they mean something different now… but I'm getting a little deep in to what the lead is. You'll listen to it and you'll hear pain."

While McCready feels that the new Mad Season package "is a little snippet of history, it's like a time capsule of that time." He also says that Lanegan's involvement has brought everything into the present. "I've always felt over the last 16 years that the only person who could ever do this justice was Mark Lanegan," McCready says. "He finally came around… I got [the new songs] back and they sound awesome."

"The original plan when we were working on that second record was that Mark was going to be much more involved in co-writing songs and this is what Layne wanted," Martin says. When the reissue idea surfaced, "we sent him all 17 basic tracks… I said, 'here's what we have, is there anything on there you felt compelled to write some lyrics and sing on. And he picked three! More than we expected."

"I don't want to speak for Mark, because they're his words, but it's his tribute to Layne and Baker. He knew those guys very well. He was one of Layne's best friends," says Martin.

For McCready, who says he will be very busy finishing Pearl Jam's next album in the coming months, Mad Season has had an impact in his Pearl Jam work. "I had more confidence to write songs directly because of that [1995] Mad Season record," he says. "Out of that came [Pearl Jam's '90s songs] 'Given To Fly' and 'Faithful.' "

"I hold Mad Season very fondly to my heart and there's a lot of sadness in that too," McCready concludes. "There's also something that makes me grateful that people have gravitated toward [it] over the years. It is very bittersweet."


BILLBOARD.com

so I have to ask. Is this thing going to be "remastered" to sound like shit?

Due out today, anyone buying? Looks like it's still around $25 at Amazon and $26 at BB.

I want it, but still think the price is a bit much.

Yeah, but when you consider it's two CDs AND a complete concert DVD, that price becomes a lot more reasonable. I'd even go so far as to call it a good deal. Maybe not a great one, but a good one. The RSD vinyl alone will probably set you back more.

Exactly. Got my copy in today and it is a nice set. It comes in an oversized type of digipak with a 30 page booklet that has history, some photos and lyrics for the album. The live cd appears to be really good quality from what I have listened to so far and of course you have the extra tracks on the regular disc. I am really looking forward to checking out the DVD.

This is around the same price I paid for a couple of the Smashing Pumpkins remastered sets so I am not bothered by the price, especially how much play this set will get.

Now if that fucking Melon Collie set will just go down to a reasonable price, I will be happy. Now that is a set with a price you can complain about.

Got it on order from Amazon, but who knows when I'll see it.

Hoping that I'll be able to track down the vinyl on RSD, but I know the odds are not in my favor. Anyone who finds it and wants to pick me up one, I'll be forever grateful!