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MURPHY, ELLIOTT Infinity CD
€ 15,00^*

Where do you go after a 50-year career in music and as many albums? I suppose INFINITY is the answer and thus the title of my 52nd (I think) album, which will be released as a limited edition CD on March 7, just in time for my tour of France/Belgium/Spain, and Italy (via Cruise ship). It’s my first studio album of original songs since Wonder (2023) and in this very recent family of songs, I tried to peer into the future while being grounded in the icons of my youth all wrapped in a diverse genre-defying musicality. Hopefully, it’s a personal collection that will appeal to the universal musical collective consciousness. That’s been my modus operandi since my debut album, Aquashow (1973).

INFINITY was produced, arranged, and mixed by Gaspard Murphy, and all songs (except “Count My Blessings,” co-written by Olivier Durand) were written by me in a surprising flurry of creative activity last year. The album was recorded nearby at Murmure studio in Paris with contributions by my musical partner for 29 years, virtuoso guitarist Olivier Durand, violinist Melissa Cox, and percussionist Alan Fatras with double-bassist Gerard McFadden on one track. Keyboards, electric bass, drum programming, and additional instrumentation were all handled by Gaspard Murphy and myself.
I’m convinced that inspiration comes in unpredictable waves, and there’s no telling when new songs, complete with melodies, rhythm, and lyric fragments, will start crashing onto the shore of my unconsciousness. But the trick is to just get on board when they do and don’t let them loose until done. Last year, I was in the grip of just such a mania and made a decision to write a song a day, which proved impossible, but fortunately, that leveled out to about a song a month, which was well within the capacity of my creative output. In some fashion, INFINITY takes on the form of a novel with songs replacing chapters and characters both past, present, and future, dancing hand in hand with a „ghostly rhythm partner…“

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We’ve lost count of how many albums Rich Hopkins has released. There are quite a few and most of them were even released on Blue Rose Records. But at some point every series ends, and this has happened with the latest work – “The Gift” is released exclusively on Hopkins‘ own label, San Jacinto Records. This is not because the masters had a falling out with his long-standing German label. The connection is still good, “best friends” so to speak, but the market has changed a lot in the last few years, musicians are founding their own record labels and marketing their new works themselves, at concerts, on their own website or even digitally via the relevant platforms. The latest figures from the music industry prove them right – just 13% of sales are generated through CD sales, with vinyl at 6% not even half of that, the rest is sold digitally. However, this is also a milkmaid’s calculation, because these proportions depend very much on the genre and the target groups, and so we cannot understand why for many artists the CD plays no role at all and sometimes only rely on vinyl. This is also the case with the new Hopkins album: It is released exclusively as a vinyl LP and we offer it exclusively in Europe via the Blue Rose mail order.

With Rich Hopkins and his wife Lisa Novak moving back and forth between their homes in Tucson, Arizona and Austin, Texas, the new album was recorded in more diverse locations and with more diverse musicians than ever before. We count a total of musicians in the album credits, including long-time companions such as Mike Therieau, Goerge Duron, Jon Sanchez, Falcon Valdez, Duane Hollis, Ernie Mendoza and Lars Goransson, who also produced the album together with Rich and Lisa. Additional singing guests included Lisa’s daughter Hannah Novak as well as Carey Bowman and Brad Brooks.

And the music? Nobody would have expected that Rich Hopkins would suddenly take different musical paths, and that’s not what happened. He puts everything into the songs again, as his many loyal fans know him. Sometimes you get the impression that the concentrated energy flows into his guitar work one last time and that he could have found a conclusion with the new album “The Gift”. But knowing Rich Hopkins, he will soon announce that he is working on a new album.

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