I was positively head over heels in love with Follow the Sun, Mexican Summer/Anthology Recordings’ stunning 2017 compilation of 70s Aussie FM radio folk rock. If your eyes walked across that last sentence and you were thinking “Ooh, that sounds like it might be really good,” trust me, it’s goddamned great. I think I must’ve played the first side 20 times before I even flipped it over and then I did the same thing with side two.

Follow the Sun was compiled by Australian musician Mikey Young (Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring) and Keith Abrahamsson (head of A&R at Mexican Summer and founder of Anthology Recordings) and the pair have returned for a sort of sequel/follow-up/companion to that classic collection called Sad About the Times. However this Times (see what I did there?) the focus is on North American folk, soft rock, West Coast jangle, power pop and more.

You can sample quite a bit of what’s on Sad About the Times below, but before you do, have a quick read of this excerpt from the marketing materials to set the mood

You are alone in a hot tub on a warm summer night back in the ‘70s. Scarcely a week earlier she was right there with you, laughing, gazing at the stars, the FM radio playing the top pop hits as you frolicked in the gurgling water. Now she’s gone. Really gone.

Then a song you never heard before comes on the radio. You feel like it reaches into some place that has already been prepared in your mind. It is as if the song is reading you. The song really knows she’s gone, and more. What a great hook, you think.

Then you never hear it again. You remember it really captured the way you felt, it sounded sad but somehow had a healing quality. Down but not out. It seemed familiar the first time you heard it, as if it had cut to the front of the line while the other meaningful songs in your life were taking years to get there. What was that song?

I have good news for you. It’s on this album even if it’s not on this album.

You probably already know, even before you’ve heard it, whether or not you’re going to love this album, don’t you?
 

 
I’ve only had a chance to listen once before posting this, but two songs that immediately jumped out at me were Space Opera’s epic “Holy River” which sounds like the Byrds meet krautrock and folk singer Norma Tanega’s “Illusion” from her nearly impossible-to-find second album I Don’t Think It Will Hurt If You Smile. Most people know her from her “one hit wonder” of the 1960s, “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” or from the use of her blistering “You’re Dead” on the soundtrack of the vampire mockumentary comedy What We Do in the Shadows and I am hoping that this means a reissue of Tanega’s sophomore album might be in the works. (Rhino has Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog, which I highly recommend, on their release schedule for June.)

Sad About the Times comes out on May 17.
 

Norma Tanega “Illusion”