Alex Chilton - Set Alex Chilton

This product is a RECORD STORE DAY 2025 title and not available to pre-order.
Available to buy in-store from 8am on Saturday, 12/04/2025 (Record Store Day).
Remaining copies will be available to buy online from 8pm on Monday 14/04/2025.

First time available on vinyl

Limited Edition of 1500 on Burning Memphis Sun vinyl

Includes some of Chilton's most popular songs: Oogum Boogum, Never Found a Girl & Lipstick Traces

Alex Chilton and Big Star fans will welcome this rare recording

In February 1999, the often-elusive Alex Chilton was in New York City for a couple of gigs at the late, great East Village dive Coney Island High, with bassist Ron Easley and drummer Richard Dworkin

The trio had enough of a groove on playing mostly vintage soul tunes that they went into a Manhattan recording studio and kept the music rolling

In a single night, they cut 19 cover tunes, and Alex produced the session himself

That sort of approach was common in the studios of Memphis, Tennessee and Muscle Shoals, Alabama during the classic era of the sixties soul, though this think-on-your-feet, overdub-free style is an anomaly today

For the Memphis born-and-bred Alex, that's the way he always liked it

In February last year, Alex Chilton was in New York City for a couple of gigs at the late, great East Village dive Coney Island High, with bassist Ron Easley and drummer Richard Dworkin

The trio had enough of a groove on playing mostly vintage soul tunes that they went into a Manhattan recording studio, Sear Sound, and kept the music rolling

In a single night, they cut 19 cover tunes, and Alex produced the session himself

That sort of approach was common in the studios of Memphis, Tennessee and Muscle Shoals, Alabama during the classic era of the sixties soul, though this think-on-your-feet, overdub-free style is an anomaly today

For the Memphis born-and-bred Alex, that's the way he always liked it. • Alex and his cohorts had a list of songs for Set, based on what they'd been cooking up on stage, but, as Alex put it, "we thought of a few more once we got there." • As he recently explained to a British reporter, "I had probably ten or twelve in mind when we went into the studio

As the evening wore on, band members would suggest tunes to do, and we'd do them

I think we only did more than one take of two or three of the songs we did, and I don't think we used any second takes on the album

There are all different approaches to do things

Over the years, I have come to think spontaneity and doing things live as much as possible is worth something

Somehow, when you layer things by overdubbing them, that seems to lose an element of spontaneity and live that's very important." • The material on Set ranges from the modern to the classic, the playful to the sexy

It stays in an R&B groove, save for a trio of jazzy numbers ("April In Paris," "There Will Never Be Another You," "Shiny Stockings") and a country tune from the even more elusive Gary Stewart ("Single Again") What links the lineup is that all these tuners are part of Alex's personal hit parade

"I know a few scholars of old R&B," he explains, "they play things for me to get me going

Plus I remember things from my teenage years, stuff that was even obscure then." • Growing up in Memphis, Alex would listen to deejay George Klein on WHBO-AM, would sign off each night with Jesse Blevin's "Goodnight My Love" –which reappears here as Alex's send-off to Set

"Lipstick Traces," written by Allen Toussaint but published under his mother's name, is another youthful fave

But other cuts, like the Randy "You've Got a Booger Bear Under There," are fresh off the car radio—if you happen to be driving around the Deep South, that is.