Ghost Stories (Dream Syndicate album)

Background

The Dream Syndicate were dropped from A&M Records for disappointing sales after Medicine Show (1984), and broke up. They got back together to make Out of the Grey (1986) on Big Time Records, but the record company folded and the band retired again. Lead singer and songwriter Steve Wynn played solo for a bit before the band reformed with the help of a record deal with Enigma Records to make Ghost Stories, released in 1988 and produced by Elliot Mazer of Neil Young fame. Mazer, apparently, thought that conflict was a positive creative force and made Wynn work while sick, and even "intentionally angered" him.

Reception

The album's songs are "dominated by themes of reminiscence and mortality." Reactions to the album were mixed. Gene Gregorits, writing from the perspective of Wynn's later solo career, called the album "pneumatically morose" and "depressing". Denise Sullivan, writing for Allmusic, gave the album three stars out of five and called it a "very straight-ahead rock album". In 2004, however, when an expanded edition of the album was released on CD, Seattle's No Depression offered a glowing review of the "dense, desperate clang".

Aftermath

In January 1988, before the album was released, The Dream Syndicate recorded a live show in a club in Los Angeles; these recordings were produced by Mazer and they were released in 1989 as Live at Raji's. Other recordings made between 1985 and 1988 (that is, between Out of the Grey and Ghost Stories) were released in 1996 as The Lost Tapes.

The band broke up in 1989, and didn't perform again until 2012 (with Jason Victor instead of Paul B. Cutler). Wynn noted in an interview that The Dream Syndicate might be on tour in 2013 and might record again; he added that he would like the opportunity to play songs from Out of the Grey and Ghost Stories, which hadn't happened since it "just never seemed right with the records I was promoting [and] the bands I was playing with in recent years".

Track list

All songs by Steve Wynn except otherwise indicated.

1. "The Side I'll Never Show"
2. "My Old Haunts"
3. "Loving the Sinner, Hating the Sin"
4. "Whatever You Please"
5. "Weathered and Torn"
6. "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" (Blind Lemon Jefferson)
7. "I Have Faith" (Steve Wynn, Johnette Napolitano)
8. "Someplace Better Than This"
9. "Black"
10. "When the Curtain Falls"

Personnel

Production