Wave Pictures paint musical image of USA

Last year, The Wave Pictures spent 6 weeks driving around America in a small van on tour with Allo Darlin’. The result of this trip is their fifth studio album - the double album City Forgiveness released on Moshi Moshi on October 21st.

“We visited Hank Williams’ house and Billy The Kid’s grave, watched the Golden Gate bridge disappear into the clouds, and had our frisbee confiscated by a cop. We played some great shows together, and we became good friends, and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove” explains vocalist and lyricist Dave Tattersall.

Whilst they drove Tattersall scribbled in a notebook - “anything that popped into my head” and on his return found “a few hundred crumpled well-travelled pages in at the bottom of my bag.”

These crumpled notes formed the basis of City Forgiveness and in Wave Pictures typically prolific style, Tattersall wrote twenty songs in “a very jet-lagged and confused week.”

They clearly had a double album on their hands; not a concept album about America so much as a testament to the way that travel excites the imagination. The title came to Tattersall in a dream and reminds him of “City Lights; the Charlie Chaplin movie and the Los Angeles company who published Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’.”

Ten years after The White Stripes recorded Elephant at the hallowed studio, The Wave Pictures took a trip to Toe Rag to record this exclusive footage of The Woods, taken from City Forgiveness.

The song is inspired by a myriad of touring experiences - both good and bad - “visiting the Buddy Holly museum, playing pool with locals, sleeping on mattresses infested with the cocoons of black widow spiders....”, it’s typical of Tattersall’s wry observational style.