Angelenos take on Sir McCartney

My pal Justin over at Aquarium Drunkard is always doing cool stuff. In addition to, you know, the record label, the book he’s written, and the 826LA lecture this week, Justin’s managed in his spare time to gather a bunch of his favorite artists from his neighborhood to record a free album covering Paul McCartney’s 1971 solo album RAM.

The delightfully anachronistic result will be free to download come Monday, with a donation requested for No More Landmines. Win win.

Justin writes:

Los Angeles: huge, sprawling, and eclectic, has been likened to microcosm of the country as whole — truly a melting pot of various cultures, ethnicities, tastes and influences. So is her music. With various scenes and sub-scenes, rarely has there been a defining “sound” that marks the overall zeitgeist of what is happening in the city at any one time. In 2008 I set out to create a compilation of a dozen or so L.A. based artists that I felt were creating something both unique and diverse. After some thought I decided that there needed to be a running theme, something to tie the artists together into a cohesive whole, a common bond.

As records tend to do, a revisited appreciation of Paul McCartney’s 1971 solo album, RAM, had begun to see a resurgence of sorts within a number of local Eastside artists, coming up in conversations and on the turntables of various house parties.

The theme was found. Over the course of the second half of 2008 eleven Angeleno artists individually went in to various studios, rehearsal spaces and apartments to record their take on what is my favorite, and arguably, McCartney’s best solo work…. the end result is RAM On L.A.

Listen to one of the covers, from Merge Records’ Broken West. Other contributing artists include folks like Frankel, Travel By Sea, Le Switch and Earlimart.

Eat At Home – Broken West

NB: Denverites, Broken West is at the Hi-Dive next Wednesday (March 11) with Blind Pilot, a band that I just can’t get enough of lately (I bought their actual physical CD on Thursday night! Like whoa).

Should be most excellent; I shall see you there.