Rich Aucoin is gearing up to retire his long-running and beloved parachute party concert format in 2025, but before then, he's taking it on the road this spring and fall. The tour has been dubbed New Nostalgia, and he's just released a song by the same name in celebration of this year's activities.
The track — which Aucoin describes as "a wake-up decree after slumbering through the remake/reboot era of 2009-2023; the idea being we’re never going to get new things to be nostalgic about if we just keep making the same things over and over again" — arrives alongside a video shot by Aucoin's brother in Antarctica.
It examines "how we can be nostalgic about the times in our lives where we felt really connected easily to the various communities of which we’re a part but that we need to wake up and continue to make new nostalgia or that’s that for new experiences. So the song and the tour both enjoy the feeling of nostalgia while pleading to not get trapped by its comforting hold," according to the artist, whose tour will also celebrate nostalgia, "while at the same time pleading that we need to make new things."
In a statement, he had this to say about the song:
I always like to tac a set of rules for each recording I do. In the past, this has been something as multidimensional as writing albums to be an alternate soundtrack to Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas or Alice in Wonderland or The Little Prince or straight-forward as Release’s rule of vocal samples in all songs or Synthetic’s only synthesizers. Sometimes it’s also been things like doing it on my own like Personal Publication EP or recording with as many folks as possible as We’re All Dying to Live (some 500+ folks on that record). Or it’s a physical rule like writing United States while riding across said country while on tour by bicycle or recording all the festival crowds I play for in the summer of 2012 to make a 20,000 person choir sound to start off Ephemeral.
For "New Nostalgia," the rule was to adhere to the rules of one of those BBC Maestro classes that [were] being advertised to be back in 2022. I purchased the Mark Ronson course and wrote down a set of rules while watching it, even beginning the song off the same Royalty-Free record he uses as an example of sampling break beats. Doubling the vocal melodies with instruments and reenforcing the main sample break with drum samples were some of the other rules while I tried out different production tips along the way.
In addition to following along with this course, I also had the idea based on the subject manner of the song to re-sample my back catalogue and find discarded and unused moments from outtakes from all my previous records so in the mix are things like the iconic piano from Hotel2Tango in Montreal that was such a signature sound of Arcade Fire’s Funeral album or the Beatles mellotron from Abbey Road that I had the fortune of getting to record for 15min in 2010 while playing my first show over in the UK at the Great Escape (still the most productive 15min of studio time I’ve ever had since what I played in those 15min have ended up now on three albums!). So the track has lots of nostalgia for me hearing elements from the last 14 years of recording.
Check out "New Nostalgia" below, where you can also find the schedule for Aucoin's tour, at which you can expect to see two sets: one of Synthetic tracks, and a second with the classic format. Get your tickets here.
