Would there be a colour attached to each album, this one's would be dark grey with little light grey sprinkles in it. And probably a tiny red one, like the painted Bird on the cover.
"Bad Old Songs", Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird's new album is a dark and more intimate follow-up to their award-winning "Lost Causes" (2011, Oriente Musik).
Kahn aficionados will recognize his unique way of mixing own compositions with extraordinary rearrangements and adaptions to one harmonious creation. Originals like Kahn's wicked Berliner ostalgie ballad "Good Old Bad Old Days" and the anti-love blues "Love Lays Low" meet polyglot reinventions of Yiddish folk songs and classics from Leonard Cohen and Franz Josef Degenhardt culminating in the rearrangement of „Die alten bösen Lieder“ (The Bad Old Songs), a poem written by Heinrich Heine and later set to music by Robert Schumann. Kahn collected old songs and new ones cursing the past or the present and sings about crestfallen love, suffer and misery, misguided religiousness and undesired heritage. In the desolate borderlands between Berlin, Detroit, New York, and Yiddishland, these Bad Old Songs are the midnight reveries of a lost time that is yet to come.