Good morning. Here’s what’s moving in the music world today.
Jimmy Eat World had to pull the plug on a run of festival dates after frontman Jim Adkins got a scare he couldn’t ignore. Getting ready for Warped Tour in Mexico City, the 50-year-old noticed what he called a “shadow cloud” creeping across his vision. He went in immediately. Doctors found a detached retina and told him surgery couldn’t wait — taking the stage risked permanent damage to his sight. The band scratched Mexico City, then Louder Than Life in Louisville and both of their Shaky Knees slots in Atlanta, including a late-night headline set. Adkins is home now, out of surgery and starting recovery. His message to fans was simple: take care of yourselves, listen to your body, and they’ll be back.
On the other end of the news cycle, people are coming back with records.
Fairhope, Alabama songwriter Grayson Capps has announced The Weight of the World, his first full album of original songs in nine years, due November 6 on RPF Records / Royal Potato Family. First single “Far Away” is out today — a windswept road song about the troubadour life. Capps says songwriting is how he navigates the world, and he makes records on his own terms and at his own pace. Co-produced with Ryan Avinger and longtime guitarist Corky Hughes at Dauphin Street Sound in Mobile, the nine-song set includes the swampy blast “News” and last year’s standalone “My Body.” The long gap wasn’t a dry spell so much as life: he and partner Trina Shoemaker finished raising their kids, and he was caring for his father. “The fledglings have all flown off,” he sings on the title track. He’s back on his own clock.
Dream-pop duo Beach House have shared a previously unheard cover as part of the 50th-anniversary edition of Robert Lester Folsom’s 1976 private-press classic Music and Dreams. The album has been newly mastered by Jessica Thompson and fleshed out with reel-to-reel demos plus new covers: Beach House on “April Suzanne,” Hannah Cohen on the title track. It drops October 16; physical and digital packages are up for pre-order.
David Byrne isn’t treating Who Is the Sky? as a finished object. A digital deluxe edition is out now with four bonus cuts, including the upbeat “My Madness,” which has a new psychedelic video. Byrne’s point is that streaming loosened the old idea of an album as a fixed sequence on a physical object. Songs can arrive later; the through-line is that they were made around the same time and still talk to each other. His tour is also heading to the big screen: Brady Corbet shot the Baltimore Hippodrome hometown shows on 70mm. And October 6 brings Byrne’s book Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up from Penguin Press.
Almost nine years after Tom Petty’s death — and nearly fifty after the Heartbreakers’ self-titled debut — the estate is marking the band’s half-century with Origins 1971–1978. Out November 6, the box gathers 51 tracks from those first eight years, including 27 unreleased, live, extended, or previously unheard sides, all newly mixed from the original multi-tracks by Ryan Ulyate. It traces Petty from Mudcrutch through the first two Heartbreakers albums, with rarities collection No Sleep Til L.A. also available on its own. Pre-order is open now.
That’s On The Beat for September 17. Take care of your eyes, put a new record on, and we’ll see you on the air.
