the original cowboy

I fucken love Against Me!. I found them originally through a co-worker and was immediately turned onto their folk sound. Searching for a Former Clarity is one of my all-time favourite albums (but I'll write about that later), and I've basically made it my mission to track down a first-press of all of their vinyl. I'm not too far away from that goal, but there are still some white whales that elude me. Their records are the centerpiece of my collection and I'll be writing about them all over the coming days.

The Original Cowboy is a series of tracks that AM put down before they went into the studio to record As the Eternal Cowboy. It's basically a collection of demos recorded and mixed in a couple hours which went on to have the full studio treatment for Eternal, so the tracks have a really raw and gritty sound.

I really love the mixes on this record, and it's really such a huge departure of the studio mix you should really consider the record to be entirely seperate, despite the obvious connection.

I picked this up the day it dropped on Fat Wreck and was extremely lucky in scoring the baby blue wax, limited to just 524. I can't recommend this record highly enough, but you'll probably have a fairly difficult time of tracking down a blue copy. Fat is still selling black presses but the blue is just so stunning you should make the effort to find one.

A good start is Limited Pressing.