Adam Buxton has announced his debut album ‘Buckle Up’ – listen to lead single ‘Pizza Time’ below.
The London actor, comedian and podcaster (The Adam Buxton Podcast) is due to release the 15-track record on September 12 via Decca – pre-order/pre-save here. Buxton has teamed up with Metronomy frontman Joe Mount, who serves as lead producer on the LP.
Pete Robertson (Beabadoobee, Jane’s Addiction, The Vaccines) is also credited as a producer on the forthcoming ‘Buckle Up’. He helmed the dreamy first song, which sees Buxton sing about “beautiful pizza time“.
Mixed by Mount, ‘Pizza Time’ is described as “a hymn” to Buxton’s teenage son Nat, whom he’d often find standing in a bathrobe next to the oven watching a pizza cook at 11am. “He’s looking for pizza/ He’s pleased to find there’s a pizza there,” the first verse goes. “Slides it in the oven and 10 minutes later, it’s pizza time.”
The track is accompanied by an official visualiser, created by Guy Larsen. He and Buxton recently collaborated on the Up In Smoke podcast, earning the pair a nomination at The Webby Awards for Scripted Fiction.
Tune in and listen here:
Speaking about ‘Buckle Up’, Buxton explained: “I don’t actually consider this actual music. One of the album titles I considered was ‘Adjacent To Music’, because every single bit of music that I’ve listened to, in my mind, is better qualified to be considered music than this.
“The more music I listen to, the more I strongly feel that I have no right to be near a record contract, especially when there are so many talented people who would love to have one!”
A press release reads: “Buxton, our most beloved podcaster, veteran of GarageBand and the jingle, will never be a rockstar.
“As Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood said, when Adam sent him the demo for ‘Pizza Time’ from ‘Buckle Up’, ‘I think you’re hamstrung by your limitations on the guitar’. But he won’t give up. Never. Even though his playing isn’t what he wants it to be.”
Decca approached Buxton to make his first solo album five years ago, but the label didn’t realise they were dealing with a “master of self-deluded overcomplication”.
The comedian told them he wanted “Berlin-period Bowie and Eno going for lunch with Radiohead and Nina Simone at Brian Wilson‘s beach brasserie”. Buxton said he also hoped to get a Bulgarian choir, before tapping up Mount to produce.
“I hoped it would be a Metronomy record with my voice!” he added, with Greenwood noting that Buxton’s lyrics sometimes inhabited “the uncanny valley between funny and sincere”.
Buxton has worked with Radiohead on numerous occasions, and created a video vignette to promote their latest album ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ (2016).
As for his working relationship with Mount, Buxton said: “I did my best to listen to Joe when he resisted my more unrealistically ambitious ideas. I have collaborated successfully so seldomly, I really tried hard to be led by him.”
The Metronomy leader explained: “I loved making this record with Adam and am very proud of my involvement in it.
“We chatted about artists like Ween, The Rutles, Eric Idle and Harry Nilsson whilst recording, and I would often think to myself, ‘What would a car full of teenagers enjoy hearing?’. Hopefully we’ve made something a car full of teenagers will enjoy.”
Other song titles on the album include ‘I Grated My Thumb’, ‘Tea Towel’, ‘Skip This Track’ and ‘Have U Seen My Phone Charger?’.
The tracklist for Adam Buxton’s ‘Buckle Up’ is:
1. ‘Intro’
2. ‘I Grated My Thumb’
3. ‘Doing It Wrong’
4. ‘Pizza Time’
5. ‘Dancing In The Middle’
6. ‘Standing Still’
7. ‘Spiders’
8. ‘Tea Towel’
9. ‘Shorts’
10. ‘Skip This Track’
11. ‘Falling To Part’
12. ‘My Feelings’
13. ‘Betjeman Notes’
14. ‘Have U Seen My Phone Charger?’
15. ‘Dimensions Of Superking’
Buxton is set to play an album launch show at Rough Trade East in London on September 17.