A Northern Soul

Richard Ashcroft has a new album coming soon. If you're a fan, you should be excited. Here's what he told XFM:

“It’s sounding shit hot,” he explained. “I’m pleased with it. It’s got a good mix to it: there’s some good raw rock ‘n’ roll on it, some moments of beauty and lushness, but there’re some tracks that are pretty raw, pretty heavy.

“And I think, lyrically, for me it’s hitting the spot,” he continued. “There’s a lot of different topics and things I’m going into, and for a time I was thinking about that very English way of writing tunes back from ’65 and ’66. The Stones, The Beatles, [all the songs] have a bit of Dylan twisted-ness in the sound, but they retain an Englishness to them.”

“That’s what I wanna be, a great English songwriter. I don’t want to be anything else, I realise that now. That’s my job, that’s my duty, to write tunes, not to fuck around.”