The Avalanches – “Interstellar Love” (Feat. Leon Bridges)
The Avalanches’ new album We Will Always Love You is coming out in December. We’ve already heard a bunch of tracks from it — the Blood Orange-featuring title track, “Running Red Lights” with Rivers Cuomo and Pink Siifu, “Wherever You Go” with Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry, and CLYPSO, “Reflecting Light” with Sananda Maitreya and Vashti Bunyan, “Take Care In Your Dreaming” with Denzel Curry, Tricky, and Sampa The Great, and “Music Makes Me High.” And now they’ve shared another new track with another big guest.
We Will Always Love You was inspired in part by the romance between astronomer Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, the TV producer who worked on Cosmos and NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project; the album cover is an image of Druyan photographed off of a staticky TV set and run through a spectrograph. And new song “Interstellar Love,” which features retro-soul singer Leon Bridges,is very directly inspired by their story.
“Leon is an incredible singer, with just the most beautiful voice. He’s from Texas but we both happened to be in LA at the same time, which was lucky as he was on my all-time wish list,” the Avalanches’ Robbie Chater explains. “When we were in the studio, I told him the story about Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan and how her love-struck brain waves were sent out into space on the Voyager’s Golden Record. And this song came out of that.”
In addition to Leon Bridges, “Interstellar Love” features a sample of the Alan Parsons Project’s 1982 hit “Eye In The Sky.” Mark Holland, head of A&R at EMI Music, says, “When I first heard the Alan Parsons sample in the original demo, all I could do was shake my head. This sample will be impossible to clear, the paperwork will be endless, and the cost prohibitive. But … I love the band and their message, I love Leon, and so … we decided to try. In the end, Alan Parsons Project were very good about it.” Listen below.
We Will Always Love You is out 12/11 via Astralwerks. Pre-order it here.