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Songs for Peacock

by Tara Jane O'Neil

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    High quality, 160g LPs in extra heavyweight, full color photo jackets. Package includes 2-color Risograph-printed insert & a set of five (5) 4x6 glossy postcards featuring Tara Jane O'Neil, Brian David O'Neil & Owen Ashworth. 12 tracks, 39 minutes.

    Stained Glass Blue transparent vinyl edition limited to 300 copies. Please note that the blue vinyl image is merely an approximation of the color, not a photo of an actual record.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Songs for Peacock via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    4 remaining
    Purchasable with gift card

      $20 USD or more 

     

  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Five (5) 4x6 glossy postcards featuring art by Tara Jane O'Neil, Brian David O'Neil & Owen Ashworth. Songs for Peacock album credits are on the back of one card & the other four cards are blank, so anyone can write a note, slap on a stamp & mail a postcard to a loved one. Each postcard set comes in its own resealable poly bag.

    Songs for Peacock postcard sets without an album download are available for purchase at orindal.com.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Songs for Peacock via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $10 USD or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $8 USD  or more

     

  • Black vinyl LP + 5 postcard set
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    High quality, 160g LPs in extra heavyweight, full color photo jackets. Package includes 2-color Risograph-printed insert & a set of five (5) 4x6 glossy postcards featuring Tara Jane O'Neil, Brian David O'Neil & Owen Ashworth. 12 tracks, 39 minutes.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Songs for Peacock via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • Black vinyl LP
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    High quality, 160g LPs in extra heavyweight, full color photo jackets. Package includes 2-color Risograph-printed photo insert & a full color postcard with complete album credits. 12 tracks, 39 minutes.

    Black vinyl edition limited to 200 copies.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Songs for Peacock via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

1.
2.
3.
Cruel Summer 03:48
4.
5.
6.
Happy House 05:01
7.
Oblivious 01:32
8.
9.
Believe 03:33
10.
Most On Fast 04:34
11.
12.
Don't Change 06:50

about

Until the end of June, 100% of revenue from digital sales of Songs for Peacock will be donated to The Audre Lorde Project, a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color community organizing center, focusing on the New York City area.

alp.org

Twenty-eight years into her kaleidoscopic discography, Songs for Peacock is the first album singer/guitarist/composer Tara Jane O’Neil has credited to just her initials: TJO. Recorded at home using primitive electronic instruments in addition to heavily effected electric guitar, bass & voice, Songs for Peacock is a collection of pop covers recalled from TJO’s youth, intended as a “mixtape” for her late brother Brian. Over twelve tracks & thirty-nine minutes, Songs for Peacock abstracts radio hits by the likes of Boy George, Bananarama, Leonard Cohen, Siouxsie and the Banshees & INXS, distilling earworms into thin wisps of dreamlike atmosphere, or stretching them into languorous psychedelic soundscapes. Songs for Peacock warps our collective musical memory to form a singular & cohesive body of work that defines TJO’s highly personal sonic landscape.

Tara Jane O’Neil explains:

Pop music is sticky. It can stick on you for 30 years without you knowing. It can stick you right back into a room or a car. Commercial radio is powerful like smell.

There was a mint green Honda Accord with a cassette player, and we drove it down Imperial Highway listening to Madonna for the first time. Even though we were listening to radio gold, it felt like a secret, not to be enjoyed with the family like my Olivia Newton John obsession could be. A lot of pop music that year felt the same. (The “ANT MUSIC FOR SEX PEOPLE” badge in the liner notes I covered over with a Sharpie. I can't remember if we bought our own copies or if I defaced yours?) The mothers were driving station wagons and Celicas and moving their bodies to Neil Diamond and to Jane Fonda. There were soup can hand weights and ceremonial leotards you could wear to stave off middle age in the afternoon. (And unbeknownst to them, finance Jane’s leftist causes.)

Like being cast in amber, pop music encases an experience.

The iconic music on this album is not directly influential to me as an artist, they aren’t songs I’ve visited as an adult listener. This is not a stroll down memory lane or a memory book from a better time—there is no better time. And memory lane is a fake thruway on a map made of wind.

This album is a mixtape, it is homage and it is distortion of sounds that were around in 1983, around the home I shared with my brother Brian. Some songs aren’t from that year; Yoko Ono came before but reached me much later, Leonard Cohen was not yet a fixture in my life in the way Duran Duran was. But I can render them like Bauhaus or Yazoo. The songs fit in this relation. In 1983 I was not yet a musician, or a critic, I was an older sister but also a younger sister, and I marveled at everything my older brothers brought in from outside the walled suburban experiment of Orange County, California. In 1983, pop star drag included some measure of cross-dressing or bedraggle, and I wanted to wear those wrestling boots and sailor hats, I wanted that unevenness and its celebration. In 1983, young girls with strawberry blonde locks would go with a jet black chop and send their mothers into desperate frenzies trying to get their beautiful daughters back. Sometimes they would come to my house looking like Siouxsie and smelling of tea rose, wearing the Wham! slogan “Choose Life” on their chests. I was too young for the early ’80s to be my teenage trial-and-error times, and so better I can remember them.

Songs for Peacock began in the fall of 2019 in the wake of the sudden death of Brian. This recording, with a borrowed drum machine and simple synthesizer, was exposure therapy and a healing mechanism.

Q: What does a person do to stop feeling blue when love disappears?
A: I recorded these songs.

Brian sent me a mixtape a year after he moved out of the house. I only remember that Blondie, Aztec Camera and INXS were on it. I don’t know if he ever listened to Leonard Cohen or if he had an opinion about the song “Believe.” This mixtape I made is not a completist effort. It is a tribute to him who was, in 1983, the bee’s knees.

—TJO

credits

released July 10, 2020

Recorded and produced by Tara Jane O'Neil
Wilder Zoby did additional recording and vibrational patches on "Cruel Summer"
Devika Wickremesinghe sang in the choir on "Everybody Knows"
Aaron Olson played electric piano on "Believe"
All other vocals, bass, keyboards, guitar, vibraphone, drum patterns and percussion by Tara Jane O'Neil
Mastered by Matt Barnhart

Thanks to Jmy Kidd, Owen Ashworth, Wilder Zoby, Devika Wickremesinghe, Aaron Olson, Lena Kassof, Sara O'Neil, Jay O'Neil, Shana O'Neil, Tom O'Neil

Layout design by Miles Wintner
Cover images from stained glass work by Brian David O'Neil (1966-2019)

1. "Borderline Intro" written by Tara Jane O'Neil (BMI)
2. "The Crying Game" written by Geoff Stephens (Peermusic (UK) Ltd, Tic Toc Music (UK) Ltd)
3. "Cruel Summer" written by Sarah Elizabeth Dallin, Keren Jane Woodward, Siobhan Maire Deirdre Fahey, Steven Jolley and Tony Swain (Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner Chappell Music, Inc., BMG Rights Management)
4. "Everything Counts" written by Martin Gore (EMI Blackwood Music INC)
5. "Everybody Knows" written by Leonard Cohen, Sharon Robinson (Sony/ATV Songs LLC)
6. "Happy House" written by Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin (Domino Publishing)
7. "Oblivious" written by Roddy Frame (Universal Music Publishing)
8. "The Chauffeur" written by Andy Taylor, John Taylor, Nick Rhodes, Roger Taylor, Simon Le Bon (Gloucester Place Music Ltd, John Taylor Songs, Simon Le Bon Music)
9. "Believe" written by Brian Higgins, Stuart McLennen, Paul Barry, Steven Torch, Matthew Gray and Timothy Powell (Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner Chappell Music, Inc., Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG Rights Management)
10. "Move On Fast" written by Yoko Ono (Downtown Music Publishing)
11. "No Summer's Cold" written by Tara Jane O'Neil (BMI)
12. "Don't Change" written by Andrew Charles Farriss, Garry William Beers, Jon Farriss, Kirk Pengilly, Michael Hutchence, Timothy William Farriss (Universal Music Publishing Group, Songtrust Ave, BMG Rights Management, Peermusic Publishing)

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Tara Jane O'Neil California

TJO is a multi-instrumentalist,composer,producer and visual artist. She creates melodic and experimental music under her own name and in collaboration with other musicians, dancers and filmmakers. As a solo artist she has released 10 full-length albums.A founding member of Rodan and guest player for countless others, TJO has performed around the world at DIY spaces, festivals and the Pompidou. ... more

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