Conor Oberst Announces March "Salutations"

Conor Oberst has announced his new album, Salutations, for March 17 release on Nonesuch Records.  The album includes full band recordings with The Felice Brothers and drummer Jim Keltner; guests include Jim James, Gillian Welch, Blake Mills, Jonathan Wilson and more.

The album is a companion piece to his 2016 lauded Ruminations. When Oberst wrote and recorded the songs on Ruminations, entirely solo - with just voice, piano, guitar and harmonica - he intended to ultimately record them with a full band. In the midst of putting together that band - upstate New York's The Felice Brothers plus the legendary drummer Jim Keltner (Neil Young, Jackson Browne, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and many more) - the passionate responses Oberst was getting  to those first solo recordings, from friends and colleagues, encouraged him to release the songs as-is, in their original sparse form, as his seventh solo album: Ruminations, which was released in October 2016. Pitchfork called it "a record like none other in Oberst's catalog, stunning for how utterly alone he sounds," and the UK's Sunday Times called it, "The rawest album yet from the forever troubled one-time voice of a generation. Political and very, very personal," saying Oberst is "one  of the best songwriters around."

Meanwhile, Oberst simultaneously moved ahead with his plans to record with the band, heading to the famed Shangri-la Studios in Malibu to record Salutations - co-produced with Keltner and engineered by long-time musical compadre Andy LeMaster. Guest contributions come courtesy of Jim James, Blake Mills, Maria Taylor, M Ward, Gillian Welch, Gus Seyffert, Pearl Charles, Nathaniel Walcott, and Jonathan Wilson.


Salutations includes full band versions of the ten songs from Ruminations, plus  seven additional songs, some from an additional session at Five Star Studios in Echo Park in fall 2016 (complete track list below). Oberst, with The Felice Brothers as his backing band, will tour in celebration of Salutations beginning March 9 in his hometown of Omaha, with stops at LA's Greek Theater in May and Celebrate Brooklyn Festival in July (full schedule below). Oberst has partnered with Plus 1 and their work delivering vital reproductive health care, sex education, and information to millions of women, men, and young people in the US and worldwide.

A video for "A Little Uncanny," directed by Josh Rawson (The Felice Brothers), may
be viewed below.

Oberst says of the Salutations sessions: "Jim was really the captain of the ship and the spiritual leader of the project. We leaned heavy on his fifty-plus years of musical insight to get us to where we needed to be. He brought such depth and  dignity to the proceedings that made everyone else involved rise to the occasion.  It was a true stroke of luck that he got involved when he did."