New Music Albums: HIPPIES, THUGS AND HEROES (Richard Thompson)

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Artist:
Richard Thompson

Genre:
Folk
Pop/Rock

Total Time:
51:00

Record Label:
New West Records

Purchase Album:
CD, Amazon Music, Vinyl,
Apple Music, Spotify

Release Date
October 16, 2026

Find out more about this album release after the jump.

Purchasing Links

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Buy the CD from Amazon

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Buy the MP3 from Amazon

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Buy the Vinyl from Amazon

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Buy the Album from Apple Music

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Listen on Spotify

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Product Description: Sixty years into a career that began with Fairport Convention and has spanned decades as one of rock's most acclaimed singer-songwriters, Richard Thompson is still chasing surprise. On Hippies, Thugs and Heroes, he let's his subconscious take the wheel, pulling from a cast of old friends, false gurus, former selves, and invented characters who insisted on having their stories told.The result is an album that refuses to sit still. It opens with the bright, Byrds-inspired jangle of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" - a song rooted in Thompson's own history with 1970s spiritual movements and the complicated pull of charismatic leaders - before swinging into the rowdy "Everybody's Stealing" and landing on the bluesy closer "Stringer." Along the way, "Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking" delivers some of his most inventive guitar work yet, a raw-nerve build into a splintered, psychedelic solo that captures a hardscrabble cast of London strivers and connivers.Recorded live with his longtime band - Taras Prodaniuk on bass, Michael Jerome on drums, David Mansfield on guitar and fiddle, and wife Zara Phillips on backing vocals - at Hobosound Studio in Weehawken, NJ, the sessions moved fast, often in just two to four takes. But the songwriting itself runs deep: more elaborate home demos gave Thompson's own musical identity a stronger hold on the final record, resulting in an album he describes as "less them and more me."What emerges is a spiritual inquiry disguised as a rock record - a meditation on the towers we build and the ruin that follows when we invest in them too completely. Thompson doesn't fully understand every song here, and that's exactly the point. Hippies, Thugs and Heroes is proof that after sixty years, the joy of not knowing where a song will take you hasn't faded one bit.

TRACK LIST:

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1 . Sorcerer’s Apprentice (03:46)

2 . Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking (04:16)

3 . Pauper’s Grave (05:38)

4 . Unsung Hero (05:07)

5 . Make Believe You Don’t Know Me (04:14)

6 . She Burns It All (04:04)

7 . Everybody’s Stealing (04:31)

8 . The Soul In Me (03:27)

9 . Pipe Dreams (03:48)

10 . The Big Smoke (03:44)

11 . Stringer (05:24)

12 .Siren (03:09)

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