Exclusive Album Stream: Megafaun Merge Pop and Psychedelia

Megafaun 'Megafaun'

Courtesy Hometapes

Click to listen to Megafaun's album 'Megafaun'

The North Carolina psychedelic rock trio Megafaun have stepped up their game for their fourth album, Megafaun, grafting the delicate banjos and stoned digressions of their previous records onto sturdy, catchy pop song structures. "I think this record’s pretty direct, pretty honest, pretty vulnerable," guitarist Brad Cook told Rolling Stone. "The element of weirdness is more integrated and more subtle."

The band also endeavored to pay tribute to the music of their youth. "Our banjo player Phil’s main instrument is piano, and he wrote a lot more of this record on it. So the songwriting changed, and it felt like an ode to a lot of music we’ve grown up listening to – the Beatles, Jackson Browne, the Dead, Paul McCartney’s solo stuff like Ram. We’re still growing a lot as songwriters, so it feels good to absorb those things in a more direct way."

Megafaun will hit stores on September 20th, but you can stream the album in full now.

Related
• Band to Watch: Psych-Rockers Megafaun Channel Seventies Influences on New Album

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter