Val Stoecklein (Blue Things) Grey Life (1968 album) AAC torrent

I've had a vinyl copy of this for twenty years, and thought more people should hear this. "Now's the Time" has been widely covered (perhaps infamously by Leonard Nimoy) but Stöecklein's version is easily the best.

Grey Life was recently been reissued on CD (which these files were apparently ripped from -- I rescued them from the increasingly greedy (c)rapid$hart to reseed on TPB) which was obviously a labour of love. So if you like this torrent, go buy the CD proper!



"Grey Life, Stoecklein’s lone solo record, released by Dot Records in 1968 to little acclaim or success. It’s the kind of record you might buy for 50 cents because the cover—a guy dressed entirely in black, sitting in the corner of what appears to be a padded room, playing his guitar—has an elegant simplicity that suggests something worth hearing. Turns out it contains something even more unlikely: 11 achingly sad acoustic songs accompanied by immaculate, over-the-top orchestral arrangements, like an extremely depressed Neil Diamond or Burt Bacharach arranging Smog. It ranges from quiet, finger-picked melancholia (“Sounds of Yesterday”) to baroque pop melancholia (“Morning Child”) to something approaching majestic (“Seven Days Away From You,” which, by the way, your life is not complete without hearing), all topped by a self-consciously slick voice that sounds a few seconds shy of total collapse. It is, in short, amazing."

From "Sad and Gone: The Story of Val Stoecklein's Grey Life, the Best Album You Never Heard" http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=9480