Alternative
Morphine release “Cocoon” on 4 December through Partisan Records. There are eight songs and they come from the sessions the Boston band walked away from in 1998, cut with producers Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade in the run-up to “The Night”, the posthumous record that until now closed the discography.
The multitrack tapes went untouched until 2023, when Kolderie and Sabine Hrechdakian, Mark Sandman’s partner, began digitising them. Kolderie mixed them and Dana Colley cut new saxophone on three songs. “Coming back to these recordings years later was a surreal experience,” Colley says. “It was like having one foot in the past and one in the present, with my saxophone bridging the gap.”
The title track is out now, in a newly mixed version nobody has heard before. One song, “Spaceman Charm”, is entirely unreleased, and the rest take in piano, acoustic guitar and several of the band’s regular collaborators. Some had circulated on bootlegs and on the 2004 compilation “Sandbox”, but they had never been gathered on one record.
Morphine formed in Boston in 1989 around Sandman’s two-string slide bass, Colley’s baritone saxophone and the drums of Jerome Deupree and Billy Conway. Sandman called it “low rock”. He died on 3 July 1999, aged 46, of a heart attack on stage in Palestrina, near Rome.
Text by Marçal Bonastre