After playing her first show since 2014 earlier this month, Marnie Stern's comeback season continues: the mid-2000s indie rock fixture has announced her first album in a decade, led by new single "Plain Speak."
The Comeback Kid arrives November 3 through Joyful Noise Recordings. It's the long-awaited follow-up to 2013's The Chronicles of Marnia. In the interim, Stern has been playing guitar in the 8G Band — the house band on The Late Show with Seth Meyers — but it sounds like the new record is a return to form.
"I expected that all those years of playing other kinds of stuff would have influenced me — and it didn't at all! I was fully back where I was before," she said in a statement. "It was so great to be able to start being myself again and when I would think, 'Oh, is that too, too weird?' I'd remember I'm allowed to do whatever I want! This is mine. It's me. I'm trying to go against the grain of this bullshit that when you get older, you lose your sense of taste. I want to empower people to not be so homogenous and go against the grain a little bit."
Spirited lead single "Plain Speak" finds her back in her finger-tapping bag, sounding idiosyncratic and chipper as ever. "'Plain Speak' keeps a positive attitude in the face of frustration," Stern said of the track. "Keeping that hope alive is really the most difficult thing for me to do in life, so I try to do it as much as possible in my music. This song is a perfect example of that. Some of the lyrics are backwards, to keep the theme of feeling like you are moving backwards in a situation and no one else seems to give a shit but you!"
Listen to "Plain Speak" below, and keep scrolling for the album tracklist.
The Comeback Kid:
1. Plain Speak
2. Believing Is Seeing
3. The Natural
4. Oh Are They
5. Forward
6. Working Memory
7. Il Girotondo Della Note (Ennio Morricone cover)
8. Til It's Over
9. Nested
10. Earth Eater
11. Get It Good
12. One and the Same
Pre-order The Comeback Kid.
The Comeback Kid arrives November 3 through Joyful Noise Recordings. It's the long-awaited follow-up to 2013's The Chronicles of Marnia. In the interim, Stern has been playing guitar in the 8G Band — the house band on The Late Show with Seth Meyers — but it sounds like the new record is a return to form.
"I expected that all those years of playing other kinds of stuff would have influenced me — and it didn't at all! I was fully back where I was before," she said in a statement. "It was so great to be able to start being myself again and when I would think, 'Oh, is that too, too weird?' I'd remember I'm allowed to do whatever I want! This is mine. It's me. I'm trying to go against the grain of this bullshit that when you get older, you lose your sense of taste. I want to empower people to not be so homogenous and go against the grain a little bit."
Spirited lead single "Plain Speak" finds her back in her finger-tapping bag, sounding idiosyncratic and chipper as ever. "'Plain Speak' keeps a positive attitude in the face of frustration," Stern said of the track. "Keeping that hope alive is really the most difficult thing for me to do in life, so I try to do it as much as possible in my music. This song is a perfect example of that. Some of the lyrics are backwards, to keep the theme of feeling like you are moving backwards in a situation and no one else seems to give a shit but you!"
Listen to "Plain Speak" below, and keep scrolling for the album tracklist.
The Comeback Kid:
1. Plain Speak
2. Believing Is Seeing
3. The Natural
4. Oh Are They
5. Forward
6. Working Memory
7. Il Girotondo Della Note (Ennio Morricone cover)
8. Til It's Over
9. Nested
10. Earth Eater
11. Get It Good
12. One and the Same
Pre-order The Comeback Kid.
