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Dec 11, 2020 Belle and Sebastian By Christopher Roberts

Scotland’s Belle and Sebastian have released a new live album, What to Look for in Summer, today via Matador. Now that it’s out you can stream the whole thing here. The band has also shared new videos for each song on the album and you can watch those here too.

Also today we posted our review of the album and you can read that here.

“Someone said it would be a good idea to have a visual clip for every song on the album. But—even though we had recorded the songs live—we only had visuals for a few of them,” explains frontman Stuart Murdoch in a press release. “So, we set to work with a talented pair of editors to make little vignettes for each song. We were deep in Covid, so we thought it might be interesting to have the band mime along with one of the songs while we stayed inside our respective Glasgow bubbles. Hence the clip for ‘Arab Strap’ came about.”

“I contrived to make a clip for ‘My Wandering Days Are Over’ on my phone featuring my nephew Ethan and our friend Meri, who lives with us,” he adds. “I had to keep them socially distanced, so that became the theme for the clip.”

When the album was announced the band have shared videos for two tracks from it, live versions of “The Boy With the Arab Strap” and “My Wandering Days Are Over.” The album is not the document of one concert, instead the tracks are culled from various shows in their summer 2019 tour, including their “Boaty Weekender” floating festival.

“We’d been badgered by our fan base to put out recordings of the shows,” Murdoch said in a previous press release, explaining why they started recording their 2019 tour.

With their 2020 touring plans cancelled due to COVID-19, and the recording of a new album in Los Angeles also off, the band busied themselves putting together the live album.

“It was something to focus on,” said the band’s Stevie Jackson. “That was very, very nice.”

“It was quite nice to be doing that when we couldn’t even see each other,” added the band’s Sarah Martin.

While Belle and Sebastian fans, when polled on Twitter by Murdoch, said they preferred live albums documenting a single concert, the band decided to take inspiration from live albums featuring tracks from different shows, such as Yes’ Yessongs and Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous.

“For a while, the working title of the record was Live and Meticulous,” Murdoch said. “The record company really wanted it to be called Live and Meticulous. But I don’t like derivative things really.”

In late 2017 and early 2018 Belle and Sebastian released three interconnected EPs via Matador, all titled How to Solve Your Human Problems. How to Solve Your Human Problems Part 1 came out in December 2017, Part 2 came out in January 2018, and Part 3 came out in February 2018. Then all three EPs were collected in a vinyl box set and CD compilation that also came out in February 2018. In 2019 they released the soundtrack for the indie film Days of the Bagnold Summer.

Read our interview with Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch on How to Solve Your Human Problems.

Read our review of How to Solve Your Human Problems.

Read our interview with Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch on Days of the Bagnold Summer.

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