Huey Lewis & The News - Plansville [7''] (previously unreleased tracks, limited to 2000, indie-exclusive)

Huey Lewis may never sing again. It's a heartbreaking revelation that the GRAMMY-winning icon is still coming to terms with, one made all the more bittersweet by the fact that his voice has perhaps never sounded better than it does today. The problem, it turns out, has nothing to do with his vocal cords, but rather his ears. On January 27, 2018, Lewis's hearing suddenly and completely disappeared just moments before he took the stage for a concert in Dallas. Meniere's can manifest itself in a number of ways. Lewis's first encounter with the disease came in the form of an intense bout of vertigo roughly 35 years ago, when he and The News were on the road in support of their seminal 1983 album, Sports. Just before a scheduled performance in Boston, Lewis found himself overcome by a spell of dizziness and nausea so unbearable that he was forced to cancel the show and head straight to the hospital. Doctors were perplexed by his symptoms at the time, but a heavy dose of steroids seemed to bring him back to equilibrium, and Lewis was able to soldier on with the rest of the tour. Heartened by the likes of Brian Wilson and Jimi Hendrix, who were both famously hard of hearing on one side, Lewis continued to work through his Meniere's, touring and recording steadily for the next two-and-a-half decades with just one fully functioning ear. While he'd still encounter the occasional bout of vertigo here and there, Lewis had more or less made peace with his condition until that fateful night in Dallas, when he suddenly found himself unable to hear on either side. What followed was a long odyssey of appointments, tests, and holistic healing sessions at clinics and institutes around the country, all in the desperate hope of finding if not relief, then at the very least, stability. In what turned out to be a remarkable stroke of luck, Lewis had, months earlier, booked studio legend Bob Clearmountain to mix the songs that would become Weather, and the longstanding dates of their session coincided precisely with the last three days Lewis was able to clearly hear the frequency ranges required for music. The mixes that emerged from those three days reflect the kind of contagious vitality and effervescent energy that have defined Huey Lewis & The News from the start, all vintage grit and modern sheen. In typical fashion, the band had engineered and produced the sessions themselves (they've in fact self-produced every album since their 1982 breakout, Picture This), and the songs they brought Clearmountain for Weather absolutely brimmed with hard-earned confidence and bravado decades in the making. Ahead of the new album, Huey Lewis & The News will be releasing an exclusive limited edition 7'' that includes 2 tracks from unreleased catalog albums SOULSVILLE and PLAN B. TRACKLISTING Side A: 1. My Other Woman Side B: 1. Got To Get You Off My Mind