Copyright Law

Broken Bells Give Away Track from Upcoming Album

By Jared Moya

Danger Mouse and James Mercer of The Shins’ new band Broken Bells make “The High Road,” a song from their upcoming self-titled album, available as a free download.

Danger Mouse of The Grey Album fame, among many other things, and The Shins’ James Mercer have teamed up to form a new band called Broken Bells. The forthcoming self-titled album isn’t due to be released until March 9th of next year, but fans can download a free copy of the track “The High Road” to enjoy until then.

The duo apparently met 5 years ago and right off the bat wanted to collaborate on a project.

?As soon as I heard the Shins, I wanted to do something with James, no matter what,? Danger Mouse tells Rolling Stone, and that on the new album James and he “experimented a lot.”

The result is, as he puts it, a an album that’s “melodic, but experimental.” If the first track’s any indication of what’s in store for music fans then many will be pleased.

Broken Bells is also taking preorders for the album right now with a CD going for $11.99, vinyl album $19.99, and a deluxe limited edition music box for $39.99.

The first real song the pair worked together on was the well received “Insane Lullaby” from the Dark Night of the Soul album.

The thing I’ve always loved about Danger Mouse, aka Brian Joseph Burton, is that it’s always been about the music for him rather than the profits. In era where bands like Metallica are worried about getting every nickel they feel owed by music fans, especially when it comes to P2P, Danger Mouse’s only concerned is putting out quality music.

With The Grey Album, a brilliant mashup album which combined acappellas from Jay-Z’s The Black Album with instrumentals from the album The Beatles (also known as The White Album), he showed the world his talent without fear of record label lawsuits.

With Dark Night of the Soul, a Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present’s album, he once again showed his resolve. After a dispute between he and his record label EMI over distribution of the album he began selling a blank recordable CD-R version labeled “for Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music” that added “use it as you will” (copies are currently selling for upwards of $125 on Amazon).

The album was soon available for free streaming on the NPR website, and after a bit of reverse engineering, was copied and made available for free download on BitTorrent tracker sites everywhere.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on December 22, 2009 (boomark / email).