Friday, 6 December 2019: Cold Chisel’s new studio album, Blood Moon, is released today on a myriad of different formats – including Deluxe CD (with bonus DVD), standard CD, Blood Moon-coloured vinyl, an extremely limited Cassette (yes, cassette!) and all digital formats.
In typical Cold Chisel style, there’s a potpourri of ideas, sounds and genres across Blood Moon – from the chooglin’ boogie of the first single Getting The Band Back Together, which celebrates the weekend warrior in all of us (including the band), to the angry, visceral epic Killing Time, the high-speed oblivion of Drive, the crazed-carnival sounds of Boundary Street to Ian Moss‘ soulful closer You Are So Beautiful.
The songs also came together in different ways – some were straight from the pen of Don Walker; Buried Treasure was the first songwriting contribution between Charley Drayton and Walker; and some tumbled out unusually: “In between our demoing and the recording, a friend of mine was reading Songs and he asked me about a handful of songs that had never been recorded or released, but were included in the book,” says Don. Two of those songs, Boundary Street and Accident Prone found their way, at the eleventh hour, onto Blood Moon. “They were songs I’d written many years before but hadn’t thought to submit. Through being reawakened to them, I tossed them in the ring and both of them stuck.”
Don and Jimmy also found a new way to work together. “Working with Don has evolved over the years,” says Barnes. “It was very intimidating when I first started writing with Don, in the earliest days of Cold Chisel. Don was writing ‘Khe Sanh’ when I was sort of scratching my head, trying to put three lines together (he laughs). In the past, when we’d write I’ve written music and Don’s written lyrics. It’s only in the last two years that the process has turned around. I think particularly since writing the two autobiographies I’ve found my voice as a writer and I think I’ve had the confidence to write and then to say ‘Hey Don, I’ve sent you some lyrics.’ I would send lyrics to Don and he’d say ‘It’s so great to have lyrics that I don’t have to anguish over.’”
The first 100 cassettes ordered on the band’s D2C store will be individually numbered and all proceeds from the sale of these will go to Foodbank to assist them in providing food for 815,000 Australians each month.
Foodbank is Australia’s largest food relief organisation, operating on a scale that makes it crucial to the work of the front line charities who are feeding vulnerable Australians. Foodbank will be further supported in various ways throughout the Blood Moon Tour 2020 including by way of special auction items and fundraising collections at each venue on the tour.
Over 175,000 tickets to the outdoor Blood Moon Tour 2020 have been sold in Australia and New Zealand with A Day on the Green shows at Sirromet Wines in Queensland (1st show), Victoria’s Mt. Duneed Estate and Rochford Wines and Heifer Station in Orange, NSW all SOLD OUT.
Blood Moon is out now on the band’s own label via Universal Music.
Blood Moon
1. Getting The Band Back Together
2. Land Of Hope
3. Drive
4. Killing Time
5. I Hit The Wall
6. Boundary Street
7. Buried Treasure
8. Accident Prone
9. Someday
10. You Are So Beautiful
