California indie rock band, Grandaddy has announced a 20th Anniversary wooden rework of their second album The Sophtware Slump on Los Angeles-based Dangerbird Records. Regarding the album’s release, the band tweeted:

One night in June of 1999, we were sitting in Jason’s tiny house in Modesto, California when he mentioned that he could sit down at the piano and play the whole of what would be The Sophtware Slump front to back. This meant he was (finally!) ready to begin recording. The piano was in the kitchen then so we sat and he started to play. Distracted by beer and conversation, we didn’t make it all the way through.

Early last year, as we discussed if we should commemorate the 20th Anniversary. I recalled the memory and wondered what the album would have sounded like before all that wonderful production, before one note had been committed to tape.

According to Pitchfork, Grandaddy guitarist Jim Fairchild stated, “With the scope of what Grandaddy has done and what Jason has done in his career, I thought there was room to pay greater attention to my favorite view of him, which is as a songwriter.”

According to the band’s tweet, the album is expected to be released digitally on Nov. 20 “as part of a four-piece vinyl box set of the original album and most of the B-sides and odds and ends from that era, many appearing on vinyl for the first time here. And a standalone physical release to follow in early 2021.”

The album’s title is a paronomasia of sophomore slump, a term used when a musician’s second album does not match the success of the first. Regarding the original album Mike Powell of Pitchfork writes, “If Radiohead captured a feeling of pre-millenial tension, The Sophtware Slump captured the feeling of disappointment that came afterward — the feeling that life was going to be more or less the same as it had been, only now we’d have to live with the fact that we once thought it’d be so different: the feeling of January 2, 2000.”

In recent news, Canadian hardcore punk band PUP released a punk cover of Grandaddy’s classic 1997 track “A.M. 180.”

Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat