Forgiven

It was almost 20 years ago when a young Edie Brickell and New Bohemians got its first bewildering taste of success. "What I Am," the lead single from Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars, resonated almost immediately with an audience bored with repetitive synthesizers and formulaic radio. That track, fueled by Brickell's hippie-chick chic and Kenny Withrow's liquid guitar solo, represented a new sound chiseled from the free-form performances of the Grateful Dead and honed by the precise power-pop of '80s radio. Within a year the band had toured the world and appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. "Our first record wasn't even supposed to do anything," recalls Withrow. "They only shipped 20,000 copies of it, and if we sold those 20,000, everyone was going to be thrilled. They sold out in a few weeks, and the record ended up going platinum."

"What I Am" was to be the turbulent band's biggest success. The hard break-up after its sophomore album and Brickell's subsequent marriage to the legendary Paul Simon seemed to put an end to the band, but the New Bohemians' story isn't over yet. With a new album on the verge of release and a growing concert schedule, the band is back for what may be the emotional highlight of its career.

Blame it all on a serendipitous visit to a messy studio. One night in September 2004, after a jam session with her stepson Harper Simon's band, Brickell was hurriedly driven across the Brooklyn Bridge to producer Bryce Goggin's studio to capture the songs the group had just written. "When I walked in the studio and started looking around I immediately thought: 'New Bohemians,'" Brickell says. "His studio is just so funky. There's junk everywhere, and it looked like the places we used to jam in and rehearse in back in Dallas...I could tell that he was the guy the New Bohemians had always been looking for--our prince!"

The New Bohemians had actually reunited on a few separate occasions, mostly when they all happened to be in the same city. In 2000, the result was The Live Montauk Sessions, a document of a few weeks that the band had spent writing and recording together just for the sheer joy of it. For the album the New Bohemians reunited with former drummer Brandon Aly and added Sorta keyboardist Carter Albrecht. The album had a great vibe but left Brickell unfulfilled. "We were just kind of all over the place, and our recording didn't sound good," she says. "I was very disappointed."

But this time, perhaps the years of distance have finally paid off. The album that Goggin eventually produced for the New Bohemians, Stranger Things, will be released July 25, and because of a unique, long-term deal with record label Concord/Fantasy, it's the band's first to receive wide distribution since 1990's Ghost of a Dog. With it, the band members are ditching their past demons and finally making the album they've always wanted to. "And that's for a lot of different reasons," Withrow says. "A lot of it was Bryce and the way he recorded us all in the same room together. So many times when you're in the studio, your music is immediately dissected. This time it wasn't a layering procedure. A couple of the songs are basically live tracks, and Edie kept an insane amount of her live vocals which is unusual for most artists." Bush echoes the enthusiasm adding, "I think this is without a doubt the best New Bohemians record we've made. It's the best representation of where we are at a particular moment."

The band's right to be so upbeat. More lush and relaxed than previous releases, the 13-song collection is a fresh, modern take on a familiar sound. After such a long absence, it's appropriate that the title track that leads off the album provides a basic history of the band: "You said 'No'/We'll never make it together," and a bridge that repeats, "And the minute you get what you want you don't know what you want anymore" before slyly concluding, "I want to tell you/Stranger things have happened." The album also includes reworkings of "Spanish Style Guitar," "One Last Time" and "Funny Thing" from The Live Montauk Sessions at the request of the band's fans who were asked to suggest songs for the album. The mostly improvised "Elephants and Ants," which closes Stranger Things, builds from a light guitar motif to a cacophonous peak full of Brickell's vivid lyrics.