Faith No More has announced that they will be reissuing their debut album, We Care A Lot, on August 19 and that pre-orders are available now. You can pre-order in three different ways, which are vinyl, CD and digitally via their website or iTunes in the links provided. The reissue will be released via Bill Gould’s, the band’s bass player, Koolarrow Records.
This was an album that started as a demo, before any label had any interest in us, explained Gould. There were a couple of reasons we decided to release this now: first of all, it’s been 20 years since it has been commercially available. Secondly, when cleaning out my basement, I discovered the original master reels, and we all thought that resurrecting this from the original tapes would be a great way to reintroduce We Care A Lot into the world. Lastly, this has been a band effort; we are releasing this in the same way as we recorded it, deciding everything amongst ourselves and getting our hands deep into the nuts and bolts…just like we used to.
The album was originally released in 1985 and was made up of ten songs that the band scrounged the money for and recorded at Prairie Sun Studios just north of San Francisco. The new remastered release will consist of the original ten songs as well as nine bonus tracks. The bonus tracks will include demo versions of “Greed,” “Mark Bowen,” “Intro” and “Arabian Disco.” There will be live versions of the songs “The Jungle” and “New Beginnings” as well as new mixes, via Matt Wallace, of “We Care A Lot,” “Pills for Breakfast” and “As The Worm Turns.” Aside from the bonus tracks. there will be liner notes from keyboard player Roddy Bottum and behind-the-scenes photos will be included with the physical release.
It has been twenty years since Faith No More first released We Care A Lot and the band has seen a great deal of success since then. But it was the originality in their sound with this album that the band owes a lot of their popularity today to. A sound that has since made the band almost impossible to categorize, as the band’s keyboardist Roddy Bottum explains.
When strangers ask what Faith No More is I’ve always said, ‘well, it’s kind of an art band…’ I say that mostly to distance us from the hard rock world that we’re often times lumped into, Bottum explains. I mean, hard rock, sure, that was part of it, but our roots most definitely and pointedly stem from a specific freakout art time and place in San Francisco, a time that no longer exists. In 1982, the hippies mingled with the punks, the artists hung out with the musicians, the dance people and the punks were one and the Satanists and the sexual pioneers… all part of the same scene colorfully setting the scene for the original inspiration for the band and We Care A Lot. That weird SF window provided a platform from which we were free to express and cultivate a really uniquely odd sound experience. In Los Angeles, no one really cared much, but SF was always super supportive, encouraging us, directly and not, to get our collective freak on.
Chuck Mosley, the bands original lead singer for their first two albums, explains his time working on the album.
With We Care A Lot, I always felt like I was part of something new and different than anything else out there at the time. It made me feel privileged to be a part of it. The other guys were so cool, and there was so much camaraderie. And that came across in the music; Bordin’s drums battling it out with Billy’s bass in antagonistic harmony, Roddy’s melodic atmosphere, swallowed up by Jim’s crunchy metal riffs. I found my place somewhere between them all, and when the album was finished, it didn’t sound like anything else.
A full track list of the remastered album can be found below.
We Care A Lot (Deluxe Band Edition) track list:
1. We Care A Lot
2. The Jungle
3. Mark Bowen
4. Jim
5. Why Do You Bother
6. Greed
7. Pills for Breakfast
8. As The Worm Turns
9. Arabian Disco
10. New Beginnings
11. We Care A Lot – 2016 Mix
12. Pills for Breakfast – 2016 Mix
13. As The Worm Turns – 2016 Mix
14. Greed – Original Demo
15. Mark Bowen – Original Demo
16. Arabian Disco – Original Demo
17. Intro – Original Demo
18. The Jungle – I-Beam, SF, 1986
19. New Beginnings – I-Beam, SF, 1986