Eric Anderson
Pioneering Greenwich Village Songwriter Eric Andersen Announces New Album, Tour
Dance of Love and Death is Troubadour’s First New Record in Twenty Years
Eric Andersen, songpoet, visionary, and stalwart recording figurehead of the 1960’s Greenwich Village folk songwriter movement has released Dance of Love and Death, a double album containing seventeen new songs. The record is his first major collection of all new material since 2003’s Beat Avenue, the new album ushers in Eric’s next round of U.S. tour dates now announced for September-October.
The creation of Dance of Love and Death took place at recording sessions with longtime studio partner Steve Addabbo at his Shelter Island Sound studio in New York and at locations in Italy and Amsterdam. The guestlist is highlighted by Lenny Kaye on guitars and bass on the hypnotic opening title track, “Dance of Love and Death.” Bob Dylan sideman bassist Tony Garnier joins on “Don’t It Make You Wanna Sing the Blues,” with unmistakable echoes of the timeless “Blue River,” with Eric at the piano, and his wife Inge on harmony vocals. Echoes of “Is It Really Love at All,” also from the 1972 Blue River album, can be heard on “Every Once in a While,” also with Eric on piano.
Dance of Love and Death is a dazzling high-wire array of blues, ballads, and signature Eric Andersen love songs that drift between a tranquil afternoon and Armageddon on the horizon. Award-winning commentator Anthony DeCurtis writes, “Love, of course, has always been one of his central themes, and, as always, he explores the entire range of that vexing, variable emotion on the album – from the agonizing frustration of the title track to the idealized beauty of ‘Love Is a Sacred Thing,’ ‘Story of Skin,’ and ‘Map of a Woman’s Heart’.”
Keen observers of Eric’s sixty plus year career will find plenty of touchstones throughout Dance of Love and Death – is there a hint of “Thirsty Boots” in “Troubled Angel”? Is the mist of “Rain Falls Down In Amsterdam” or the specter of “Ghosts Upon the Road” winding through “River Spree (Berlin)”? And how many decades of smoky late-night jams are cutting across “Broken Bone Blues”? Eric’s lifetime of experiences has illuminated us for years, never brighter than on this newest album. “Indeed,” DeCurtis writes, “when Andersen performs these new songs on stage, they elicit as emotional a response from the audience as his more familiar classics. That is a tribute to the artfulness of Andersen's talent, his peerless ability to plumb the depths of human experience – and the human heart.”
About Eric Andersen:
“Eric Andersen is one of our finest singers and songwriters, in the most literal sense of that tradition…the most elegant of singers." - David Fricke, Rolling Stone
Eric Andersen, subject of the award-winning 2019 PBS documentary The Songpoet first came to prominence as a singer and songwriter during the early 1960’s folk music and culture explosion centered in Greenwich Village and Boston. He quickly became a central figure in the cast of characters that included Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Richard Fariña- artists who forever changed the course of popular music and its role in society, the reverberations of which are still being felt around the world today.
Over the years, Eric’s songs have been covered by an astonishing number of artists including Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Judy Collins, Rick Nelson, Janis Ian, Peter Paul and Mary, The Grateful Dead, Linda Thompson, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lenny Kaye, and Francoise Hardy- plus many others across Europe, Australia, England, and Japan. Among Eric’s co-writing collaborators are Lou Reed, Townes Van Zandt, Rick Danko (the Band), and Bob Weir (Grateful Dead).
Andersen took part in the Festival Express tour across Canada in 1970 with the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, Delaney Bramlett and others. He hung with Andy Warhol, Joni Mitchell and The Beatles (nearly inking a management deal with Brian Epstein, unfortunately derailed by his death in 1967), riding a wild rollercoaster of ups and downs that few artists have experienced. Tribute to a Songpoet: Songs of Eric Andersen (2023) featured a jaw-dropping lineup of artists singing Eric’s tunes, from Dylan to Linda Ronstadt, a whopping 42 songs.