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News

In Retrograde album drop: T-minus 56 & counting

This just in: the release date for Big Green’s new album, In Retrograde, is May 1, 2025. Man goddamn, it’s about freaking time! This is Big Green’s fourth album and its first in more than ten years. (Mama told us to take it slow, and that’s what we’re doing.)

LEARN MORE ABOUT IN RETROGRADE

Just a few facts to share about In Retrograde:

  1. It’s Big Green’s longest album yet – In Retrograde weighs in at 24 tracks, all original, all written for this album. In fact, it would be a double album if that were still a thing (which it ain’t).
  2. It’s digital only – That’s right, we’re not pressing a CD this time unless people really, really, REALLY want one.
  3. It’s being distributed by CDBaby – We decided to roll with CDBaby as they handled our last release, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, back in 2013.
  4. No songs about presidents or dressage horses – Unlike our last two albums, this one doesn’t have overt political or T.V. show references, though there are some mentions of veganism here and there if you listen with a stethoscope.
  5. It has retro album art – Kind of old fashioned, an oblique nod to the overall style of the recordings (60s – 70s rock). And yes, there’s a robot. (See below.)
In Retrograde, by Big Green.

Q. But Big Green … where do I find said album?

We were hoping you would ask that question. The album will be available for streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music. Pre-order date on streaming services is April 1. Links are available on this HearNow.com page:

PRE-ORDER / PRE-Add: IN RETROGRADE

Q. But damn it, Big Green – I don’t use the internets! Where do I get a CD, huh?

Gotcha. Tell you what we’re gonna do. Just contact us and we will burn you CDRs of the entire album (spoiler alert: it will be two discs) for a nominal fee, to be determined. Don’t got no money? No problem – we’ll send it to you gratis, as long as we can afford to do so. (Spoiler alert #2: if we get more than a dozen or two requests, we’ll look into pressing a limited run.)

Add us to your playlists!

Hey, man … do a brother a favor. If you’ve got accounts on Apple Music, Spotify, or one of the others, give us a follow, leave us a review, add us to a playlist or two.

Usual Rubbish

Burning Verses.

2000 Years to Christmas

Got the toaster plugged in? No, not THAT toaster. I mean the kind that pops up CDRs. Yes, it needs juice – what the hell century are you living in? Jesus Christ on toast. No, that WASN’T my breakfast order!

There are times, my friends, when it feels like I speak an entirely different language from my flopmates. And this is one of those times. Now that the nice weather has returned to upstate New York, you might think that we would venture forth from the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house, and enjoy the five minutes of sunshine we get each year, whether we need it or not. Well, you would be wrong to think that. God, no – Big Green is still cooped up inside this dump, trying to decide how to slice and dice the mountain of makeshift recordings we’ve done over the past five years under the rubric of Ned Trek. Now, is that any way to spend your summer? (All five minutes of it?)

What’s the urgency? Well, I can’t answer that, except that there appears to be some line of code in Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s programming that requires him to do an exhaustive inventory of our work product every seven months. That’s all well and good, except that we are – as you likely know – the most disorganized band in the history of music, so our efforts to accommodate this half-crazed automaton fall more than a little bit short. Story of our lives, right, people? We just write ’em, play ’em, and record ’em. What happens after that is not our department. So as a consequence, we’ve got songs lying around the mill, knee-deep in parts, jumbled together in a hap-hazard fashion – an auditor’s nightmare, to put it succinctly. Every seven months, it makes smoke come out of Marvin’s brass head. (Note to audience: that’s NOT supposed to happen. Marvin is battery operated – no emissions, period.)

Slave driver!

Take Ned Trek (please!). We had something like 40 episodes of the show, posted as a feature on our long-running podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, with a “rebroadcast” on a separate feed as simply Ned Trek. Something like half of these shows were musicals, which means that they included five or more original songs – sometimes as many as 8 in a single episode. After five years of production, more or less, we have about 100 Ned Trek songs in total. Marvin wants us to funnel them all into disc-length (80 minute) albums, like we did with Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (another product of THIS IS BIG GREEN technology). That sets us up for a conundrum – do we (a) put all of the songs onto multiple discs, or (b) cherry pick the ones we like best (or hate least) and consolidate them on maybe two discs? Just a preliminary sort brings us to five or six discs total – that’s just nuts. Even Marvin can’t count THAT high.

Well, whatever we decide to do, the next thing we’ll need to do is try to find people who still listen to CDs. (We save that hardest shit for last.)

Usual Rubbish

Twelfth Month.

2000 Years to Christmas

Did you hear that just then? That faint sound of bells ringing in the distance? That can only mean one thing …. the elementary school up the road is having a fire drill again. Third one this week.

Oh … and of course, it’s December again, the month of joy and celebration. Which means, in this year of our lord 2020 (which happens to be the year of YOUR lord 2020 as well), we are fast approaching the first anniversary of the twentieth anniversary of the release of our first LP, 2000 Years To Christmas, a space odyssey … I mean, an album by Big Green. Now when I say “LP”, I mean “CD”, actually, because we never pressed vinyl on any of our records. That’s for the heavy wallet brigade, my friends, though we have considered converting Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into some kind of record-cutting machine. (For the record, he’s not keen on the idea.)

Yeah, so here we are, a year later, still flogging the thing. And why not, right? Our first album is 21 years old. It can buy a drink in New York, maybe two. (If it can find an open bar, of course.) But even more significant is the fact that the album is themed to the season. It is, after all, a Christmas album in a way – not a collection of traditional carols and popular songs, but an alt-rock album written on the theme of Christmas. That’s why December is such a special month around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-home. Of course, there’s also the arrival of heavy snow, which typically comes through sections of the roof that are no longer quite as roofy as they used to be. That makes December extra special, too.

Aw, come on, Marvin!

Now, I don’t want you to think that we’re just huddled here in our drafty mill, sifting over the artifacts of a career that’s long since gone sour. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’re not huddled at all – not in this era of social distancing. Nay, we’re standing a respectable distance apart from one another as we sift. In the hammer mill, that amounts to 17 and a half feet. (We’ve got extra floor space, so it only makes sense to err on the side of distance.) We’re working on some remixes this winter, trying to refurbish some songs that we recorded in a hurry over the past few years. And I think Anti-Lincoln is working on a new shepherd’s pie recipe, though I’m not sure where he got it from. Never heard of a pie made of digestive biscuits and peanut butter. (By pure coincidence, that’s what was lying around the kitchen this week.)

Anywho, have a great December. This year is almost over, people. Damn.