Beggars Banquet is happy to release an expanded edition of Buffalo Tom’s fifth album Sleepy Eyed, celebrating it’s 30th Anniversary this year.
Set for release on October 31st, on 2XLP/CD, the album has been expanded to include six demos that the band unearthed specifically for this release. All home recordings, “Hold Me Up” and “Don’t Blow Your Wind” are gorgeous completely unheard songs that somehow didn’t make it any further than a demo. “Tangerine”, “Summer”, “Kitchen Door” and “Clobbered” are a window into how these Buffalo Tom classics got their start.
Sleepy Eyed has been expanded into a double LP, and the refreshed artwork includes new photos and images of ephemera plus notes written by the band and producer John Agnello about the recording of the album.
Sleepy Eyed marked a turning point for the band. Their previous album, 1993’s Big Red Letter Day was a huge album for them, landing on the Billboard charts and bringing them to new levels of fame when “Late At Night” was heavily featured in a pivotal scene of the short-lived mid-90s cult TV show “My So Called Life” which starred Claire Danes and Jared Leto. The song was not only in the episode, but the band was also shown performing it.
The making of that album was a massive, glossy undertaking, recorded in LA with huge producers, and as Bill Janovitz noted “It was a full-on, old-school peak-analog record production”. The band’s inclination for their follow-up was to bring it back to a more stripped down and raw recording situation. Bill said, “I was thinking of Some Girls and Tonight’s the Night, and those electric Dylan records like Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, where you could hear instruments bleeding into each other, snare drum rattling from the guitars and bass, and off-microphone stuff, and even mistakes, where it just felt like you were in the room with the band.”
They found the perfect partner in this plan with producer John Agnello and the perfect place to make it – at Dreamland Recordings Studio in upstate New York. Tom Maginnis noted that “there were really no distractions, and we ended up spending long days into the night at the studio and just crashing at the house to sleep. We would do take after take to get the right basic track, so it felt like playing many live sets in a single day.”
The songs on Sleepy Eyed, which include an impressive opening trio of three of their most popular – “Tangerine”, “Summer” and “Kitchen Door” are amongst many fan favorites. Their trademark harmonies, timeless songwriting and guitar fueled passion is perfectly exemplified on this release.
Buffalo Tom (Bill Janovitz, Chris Colbourn and Tom Maginnis) formed at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1986 – a breeding ground of post punk guitar bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Pixies. The three longstanding bandmates recognize the achievement of their longevity as a creative unit – 10 albums, 40 years as a band. Nice work if you can get it!
