Pitchfork: Lucksmiths to Issue EP Next Month

After a year of mostly touring and a few low-profile tracks on tribute albums, the Lucksmiths went back to the studio in late 2004 to restore the balance between their good-natured, wistful pop music and the evil-tempered, ahistorical world outside.

That outside world, by the way, might include you. Their new EP, available through mail-order in mid-February and in stores a little later, is called The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco, and it treats the titular city with a poignancy appropriate to just how far it is from the Lucksmiths' home in Australia. We sent them a last-ditch email trying to get it changed to "East Lansing", but as you can see, no dice:

01 The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco
02 Young And Dumb
03 The Winter Proper
04 I Started A Joke (Bee Gees cover)

"The Chapter..." will appear on a currently-untitled Lucksmiths full-length slated for this May; the other three will not. Songwriter Marty Donald had this to say about his new ode to the land of fog: "[The song] takes its rather unwieldy title from a pamphlet I stumbled upon upstairs in a second-hand bookshop in Daylesford, foraging through a suitcase marked "ephemera". Back home, a few minutes' research told me it was a pro-Californian publication produced during the Depression era to persuade westward emigration-- all very Steinbeckian. It took a couple of years for the song to take shape (and to think of a rhyme for "San Francisco" that wasn't too preposterous)." How about San Luis Obispo? Covered in crisco? I've got a lisp-o? Can't front on this, ho? Oh, to hell with it.