A Poet's Life

I'd heard a while back that Tim Armstrong, of Rancid, was working on a solo album, but I'd forgotten about it. Today, I got caught up on what Tim's been doing.

The album is called A Poet's Life, and it's on Epitaph. The original plan was to release it free to the internet, one song at a time. They released a couple of songs, but not it sounds like they're going to release the whole thing at once. Not sure if it'll be purchasable or what, but it comes out on May 22nd. Every song will have a video, and the first three are on YouTube (and in this post).

What I've heard is so fucking awesome. It sounds like he's doing a whole record of ska songs that sound very heavily influenced by the 80s 2-Tone stuff. In listening to these first three tracks, I've thought "The Specials" quite a few times. Tim's using the Aggrolites, one of my favorite bands, as his backing band, and they sound awesome. The songs are a great compromise between Tim's ska-punk and the Aggros' more traditional stylings.

The really interesting thing here is that the Aggrolites are playing next week at Slim's. It'd be pretty fucking awesome saucesome if Tim joined them on stage to do a few of his songs. Crossing fingers!

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