The surviving members of Morphine have reunited to complete an LP called Cocoon, started and abandoned in 1998, a year before the on-stage death of singer Mark Sandman. Decades in the making, the eight-song album is the Boston-based alt. rock outfit’s first full-length since fifth album The Night, posthumously released via DreamWorks in 2000. Watch an archival video for the title track below, ahead of the release on December 4, via Partisan.
The band’s 1998 sessions were produced by Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, the longtime Morphine production duo that also produced Radiohead’s Pablo Honey and Hole’s Live Through This. Kolderie worked with the late Sandman’s partner, Sabine Hrechdakian, to assess the original tapes from the sessions that now form the basis of Cocoon. Kolderie said in press materials, “I was astounded by the sound of the tracks when I put them up at the studio where we transferred them. It really felt so right to be bringing them back from the crypt into the world again.”
To complete the album, Kolderie gave the recordings new mixes, and band member Dana Colley recorded new saxophone parts for three songs. Unlike most of Morphine’s catalog, which was an exercise in rock minimalism, the recordings incorporate piano, guitar, and contributions from multiple drummers. (The Night had been the group’s first LP recorded as a quartet, rather than its usual trio setup, owing to contributions on drums from both returning cofounder Jerome Deupree and his replacement Billy Conway.) In press materials, Colley added, “Coming back to these recordings years later was a surreal experience. It was like having one foot in the past and one in the present, with my saxophone bridging the gap.”
Morphine officially disbanded in 1999, immediately after Sandman’s death of a heart attack at the Nel Nome del Rock festival in Italy. Hrechdakian said, alluding to the album title, “Mark loved performing and traveling the world, but he also loved to come home and cocoon. It was our home and his studio, so there was always music happening, tape running, friends dropping by at all hours, lots of cooking. The lyrics speak to the hardship of being away from loved ones while the band was on tour and the joys of homecoming. There’s also this thread of space travel that runs through the album, so I imagine the cocoon as a kind of spaceship for two who leave the world and return to it.”
