WATCH ‘Travelling Shoes’ by Lawrence Arabia

The album The Sparrow is released on Bella Union/Yep Roc on Monday 16th July

the material for The Sparrow was accumulated throughout 2010, while Lawrence and his band The Prime Ministers toured in support of Chant Darling. Images like the “crude moustache, exposed brains” seen on a poster of Zac Efron in the New York subway, the jaded conversation with the Tom Tom on a rainy British motorway, “the last breaths” of a London house party that dragged on just a little too long, were collected throughout the year as context-free scribbles in a diary, waiting for songs to attach themselves to.

These images found homes during a fairly frenzied period of writing in borrowed lounge rooms and rehearsal spaces at the end of anotherabject London summer. During the same period, the enigmatic title “The Sparrow” surfaced and became some kind of mysterious guiding image for the aesthetic of the album, the angst of the inexorably approaching thirties, represented in the form of a small, malevolent bird… God knows why.
In late 2011, with Elroy Finn and Connan Mockasin, Lawrence recorded the basic tracks for these new songs, live, at a large house in Surrey that became known as the Japanese Academy. Strings and horn overdubs were added in a couple of sessions at Auckland’s Roundhead Studios. The Sparrow was produced and mixed by Lawrence Arabia.

LAWRENCE ARABIA will embark on a European Tour following his appearance at End Of The Road Festival as part of Bella Union’s 15th anniversary celebrations. All dates below…

Friday 31st August – End of the Road Festival
Monday 3rd September – Café Video, Gent, Belgium
Wednesday 5th September – Divan Du Monde, Paris
Friday 7th September – Paradiso, Amsterdam
Sunday 9th September – Studio 672, Cologne
Monday 10th September – Roter Salon, Berlin
Wednesday 12th September – Lexington, London