Home Artist: Lee Hazlewood Requiem For An Almost Lady
Lee Hazlewood
Requiem For An Almost Lady
LITA162LP
- Album remastered from pristine LHI master tapes
- Includes outtake “I’ve Just Learned to Run” and previously unreleased demo “Little Bird”
- Liner notes by Hunter Lea including an interview with Suzi Jane Hokom
- LP housed in a deluxe gatefold Stoughton tip-on jacket
Description
This is a group of songs about one lady… her name is not important… she knows who she was…What is important is once she loved me very much…These songs are a truthful attempt to show the effect the loss of this love had on me… They are not all sad songs full of self pity and remorse… but more a mixture of good and hard time, old and new thought, lost and found feeling, and near and far places… There was no pleasure (as there usually is) in writing this album… there was only the dull “thud” of realization that something you once took for granted is gone… and those “blue eyes” will never again look through this “old grey curtain”…The lady is dead now and I’m still alive… doing the same things with others I once did with her… and maybe that’s what being alive is all about it… if it isn’t… “to hell with it”.
- Lee Hazlewood
“He was a storyteller, that’s his music… the storytelling. That’s the thing I fell in love with him for. This final story that we see, the Requiem story, is kind of looking back at a career, I think. Not just a relationship—it’s his story. I think it’s authentic and the most revealing, really, because other things are cloaked, cloaked in romanticism, in a way. When you think of ‘Sand’ and ‘Jose,’ ‘My Autumn’s Done Come’ and ‘Some Velvet Morning’… those are stories, they’re stories you make up… they’re fiction. This is a little closer to home, I think.” -Suzi Jane Hokom.
Light in the Attic Records is proud to continue its Lee Hazlewood Archival Series with LHI Records final release. 1971’s Requiem for An Almost Lady is a personal statement and one of the heaviest break-up albums of all time. There are no lilting strings, sweeping choirs, or dancing trumpets. The arrangements are stripped down to the raw nerve; Lee’s emotions are the orchestra here. The listener eavesdrops on a sonic journal of heartbreak. After losing his lady, his record label, and his country, Lee etches his woes to wax.
This is a group of songs about one lady… her name is not important… she knows who she was…What is important is once she loved me very much…These songs are a truthful attempt to show the effect the loss of this love had on me… They are not all sad songs full of self pity and remorse… but more a mixture of good and hard time, old and new thought, lost and found feeling, and near and far places… There was no pleasure (as there usually is) in writing this album… there was only the dull “thud” of realization that something you once took for granted is gone… and those “blue eyes” will never again look through this “old grey curtain”…The lady is dead now and I’m still alive… doing the same things with others I once did with her… and maybe that’s what being alive is all about it… if it isn’t… “to hell with it”.
- Lee Hazlewood
“He was a storyteller, that’s his music… the storytelling. That’s the thing I fell in love with him for. This final story that we see, the Requiem story, is kind of looking back at a career, I think. Not just a relationship—it’s his story. I think it’s authentic and the most revealing, really, because other things are cloaked, cloaked in romanticism, in a way. When you think of ‘Sand’ and ‘Jose,’ ‘My Autumn’s Done Come’ and ‘Some Velvet Morning’… those are stories, they’re stories you make up… they’re fiction. This is a little closer to home, I think.” -Suzi Jane Hokom.
Light in the Attic Records is proud to continue its Lee Hazlewood Archival Series with LHI Records final release. 1971’s Requiem for An Almost Lady is a personal statement and one of the heaviest break-up albums of all time. There are no lilting strings, sweeping choirs, or dancing trumpets. The arrangements are stripped down to the raw nerve; Lee’s emotions are the orchestra here. The listener eavesdrops on a sonic journal of heartbreak. After losing his lady, his record label, and his country, Lee etches his woes to wax.
Artist Bio
Though he’s perhaps best known for his work with Nancy Sinatra (including writing mega-hit "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'"), Hazlewood did stunning work away from that particular glamour queen and found latter day champions in Beck, Sonic Youth, Jarvis Cocker, and Spiritualized.
A songwriter and producer by trade, Hazlewood sang the songs that no one else wanted to take from him, never quite achieving the success that others had with his compositions and drawing few royalties from them in comparison. These were the tracks released on his own LHI label: Lee Hazlewood Industries.
A natural wanderer, Lee lived a big life, fighting in the Korean War, working as a radio DJ in Phoenix, Arizona, setting up Viv Records in the 50s, working as a big-shot LA producer in the 60s, signing Phil Spector to his Trey Records label, and prematurely announcing retirement in the wake of the mid-60s British invasion. (Spoiler alert: he didn’t). Nancy Sinatra came along, the hits started flowing, and he continued producing characterful solo albums into the 70s, which saw his move to Sweden. By 2007, Hazlewood was living in Vegas and begrudgingly enjoying that flurry of latter-day interest in his work.
