Secretly Canadian Announces Richard Swift Compilation

Today, Secretly Canadian has announced that they will be pressing a new, career-spanning compilation of Richard Swift’s solo music. 4 Hits & A Miss is due out November 1 digitally, with two LP variants to come later this year. During his lifetime, Swift worked with The Shins, Damien Jurado, Sharon Van Etten, Lonnie Holley, The Arcs, Foxygen and others. The compilation will pull from Swift’s expansive discography, highlighting chapters from Dressed Up For the Letdown, The Atlantic Ocean, Ground Trouble Jaw and, of course, his posthumous final LP, The Hex.

Taking cues from the songbooks of Captain Beefheart and Bo Diddley, Swift was an imaginative, scholarly presence in this century’s pop canon, meshing time-worn melodies with contemporary psychedelia. It’s Vaudevillian, cartoonish and sentimentally splendid. When he was still with us, Swift was the heir apparent to Harry Nilsson; a guy who could settle into a beautiful contrast when surrounded by his interests: funk, blues, doo-wop and soul. Recently, Swift’s Ground Trouble Jaw landed at #6 on our list of the greatest EPs of all time. Of his music, I wrote that Swift transports you “to a place not in the past, but a place that never fully existed to begin with.”

Kevin Morby, a friend and former collaborator of Swift’s, wrote:

““There’s an old boy-scout myth I heard about as a child where, if you put the right person in the middle of the forest, armed with only a Swiss Army knife, they could build you a chapel.

“When I think back on this myth I end up thinking of Richard Swift who, if dropped in the middle of the forest with only a $10 Radio Shack microphone, would somehow construct a studio and within that studio build you a chapel of sound. In fact, he essentially did exactly this at his own National Freedom studio in the middle of the Oregon woods, in a town called Cottage Grove where he recorded countless hours of both his own and other people’s music.

“Those chapels of sound will, and I have witnessed it already, awe and inspire generations to come—in the same way that those stone chapels of early Europe do. Each leaves people bewildered and wondering: how was something so massive and so beautiful constructed with such minimal and archaic tools—and in Richard’s case, so quickly?

“Once they’ve passed away, most artists seem to finally rest, their catalogs resting eternally beside them. But Richard, from somewhere in the great beyond, seems restless, and the work he began down here on earth continues. His last album, The Hex, was released only a few months after his untimely death in 2018 and now, with 4 Hits and A Miss, we have a collection of his most beloved songs all in one place, as well as a new unheard ever before track “Common Law”, recorded around 2012.

“Whether you’re a casual fan or a Swift purist, 4 Hits & A Miss is either a perfect starting place or a destination for us devoted fans to find, yet again, something new to awe and inspire. Like a hidden room inside his already impressive chapel, there’s always something new to discover from our beloved friend and hero, the late great Richard Swift.”

Check out the lyric video for “Would You?” and the 4 Hits & A Miss artwork and tracklist below.

SIDE A
The Original Thought
Dirty Jim
Would You?
The Atlantic Ocean
Buildings in America
Common Law
Broken Finger Blues

SIDE B
Lady Luck
A Song For Milton Feher
The Songs of National Freedom
The Novelist
Ballad of You Know Who
Whitman
Walking Without Effort Theme