Morphine Announce Posthumous Album 'Cocoon': Hear Title Track

As the years pass, it gets harder and harder to believe that Mark Sandman was a real guy — that he made the music that he did, that he looked like that, that he was actually named Mark Sandman, and that he died in the way that he did. He was like a character that Jim Jarmusch might dream up. Sandman sang in a deep and lascivious baritone and played two-string slide bass as the frontman of Morphine, a jazzy Boston rock band who basically sounded like nothing else, before or since. Morphine made four albums, including the solid-gold 1993 classic Cure For Pain, before Sandman died from an onstage heart attack while playing a 1999 show in Italy. A fifth Morphine album, The Night, came out in 2000, after Sandman's death. Now, more than a quarter century later, another posthumous Morphine album is about to see release.

Just before the end of the year, Morphine will release Cocoon, a new album constructed from music that Mark Sandman left behind in the last years of his life. Before making The Night, Morphine started and then abandoned a series of recordings with Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, the Boston producers who worked on classics like Hole's Live Through This, Radiohead's Pablo Honey, Uncle Tupelo's No Depression, and Morphine's Cure For Pain. (They actually produced three Morphine albums, the others being 1992's Good and 1995's Yes.)

Many years later, Kolderie and Sandman's partner Sabine Hrechdakian went through those tapes, transferring the audio and picking songs to include. Kolderie mixed the record, and Morphine saxophonist Dana Colley came into to record new parts for three songs. (Morphine were a spare trio, usually just employing two-string bass, sax, and drums — no guitars. Again: Hard to believe they were real!) The acclaimed writer and occasional Stereogum contributor Hanif Abdurraqib wrote the liner notes. In a press release, Hrechdakian says:

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.

In advance of the album, we get to hear the title track, a soft-rumbling churn that takes me right back to when I first encountered this band via late-night radio broadcast. A version of "Cocoon" previously came out on Mark Sandman's posthumously released 2004 double CD Sandbox: The Music Of Mark Sandman. Below, check out the song's video, which is full of archival footage.