Adventures In Your Own Backyard (album)

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Patrick Watson Album
Name	Adventures In Your Own Backyard
Tracks	12
Total length	Unknown
Recorded	2011
Writer/composer	Patrick Watson, Mishka Stein, Simon Angell, Robbie Kuster
Producer
Art work
Publisher	Secret City Records, Domino records
Format(s)
Catalogue number
Release date	April 16th Europe, April 17th Canada, April 20th Germany, April 30th UK and rest of the world (excluding USA), 1th May USA
Chart position
Album chronology
	<	Adventures In Your Own Backyard	>

Contents 1 Information 2 Track list 3 Recording and announcement 4 History 5 Lost songs

[edit] Information

Adventures In Your Own Backyard is Patrick Watson's fifth studio album, released three years after previous album Wooden Arms in 2009.

[edit] Track list

1. Lighthouse
2. Black Wind
3. Step Out For A While
4. The Quiet Crowd
5. Into Giants
6. Morning Sheets
7. Words In The Fire
8. The Things You Do
9. Strange Crooked Road
10. Noisy Sunday
11. Adventures In Your Own Backyard
12. Swimming Pools
13. The Things We Do (bonus track, digital only)

[edit] Recording and announcement

The album was recorded mostly in 2011, in Patrick Watson's studio at his home in Montréal. In the band's own words, for this album, they wanted to "make the kind of music we would want to listen to at home." It was announced on the 25th of January, 2012 through Facebook and Twitter. As a teaser, the band's website redirected to www.AdventuresInYourOwnBackyard.com, a new website dedicated to the new album. It shows an interactive video of what will probably be the album cover, and allows users to listen to the first single off the album, Into Giants.

On March 20th, 2012, the band released another teaser. It's a 30 seconds video directed by Brigitte Henry which contains a 30 second snippet of the album version of Lighthouse. It can be seen here.

[edit] History

Prior to the announcement of Adventures In Your Own Backyard, the band have been writing and playing quite some new songs. The oldest new song that will be on the album is Morning Sheets, which was first played live during the November Europe tour in 2009, at that moment called "Underneath The Morning Sheets".

There are two songs on the album that are even older, but have been reworked to a different version. The first one is Black Wind, which was played live during the first months of January 2007, some time before the release of Close to Paradise, on which it did not end up. In 2011, a fully revived version of this song was played live again. There's almost no resemblance to the 2007 version. The lyrics are very different. Only a subtle version of the 2007 riff can be heard, speed up, in the 2011 version.

The other song is Strange Crooked Road which was played live just before the release of Wooden Arms and also featured on the Take Away Show series. It did not end up on Wooden Arms, because, according to the band, "it didn't work out on the record". In 2012 however, a reworked version will appear on "Adventures In Your Own Backyard".

Most of the other songs were played during the small amount of live shows in 2011. Lighthouse, Black Wind (2011 version), Words In The Fire, Step Out For A While and Swimming Pools made their debut on the 24th of March 2011, at the first show of 2011 at the Théâtre de la Ville in Longueuil, QC. The Things That You Do made its live debut the day after, at the Cabaret Théâtre du Vieux Saint-Jean, being derived from an improvisation at the Kino Kabaret du Montréal in 2010.

Into Giants was probably written during that time, or shortly after, because the band played it for the first time during their Portugal tour in April 2011. It was later released as the album's first single.

The remaining songs were probably written during the summer, being played for the first time at a couple of gigs in Canada and the US in the fall of 2011.

[edit] Lost songs

A couple of songs were heavily rumoured to be on the album, but didn't make it in the end. They might appear as a b-side later on. One of them being Anywhere, the other was called 12 Steps.