An unreleased Neal Casal song, Muscatine, opens a posthumous album of home recordings

A previously unreleased Neal Casal song called Muscatine is out, and it introduces a posthumous album assembled from tapes nobody had played in about a quarter of a century. Book Of Stories (Home Recordings 1998-2003) arrives on 6 November through the Neal Casal Music Foundation, Blackwing Music and Royal Potato Family.

The twelve tracks all come from one machine. In 1997 the engineer Jim Scott, who produced Casal's early albums Fade Away Diamond Time and Anytime Tomorrow, gave him an Otari eight-track analogue recorder. Casal used it at home, first in his native New Jersey and later after he moved to Los Angeles, playing every instrument himself.

"Neal became adept at playing all the instruments on his songs and making these lovely recordings," his longtime manager Gary Waldman said. None of the material ever reached an official album, which is usually a sign that an artist judged it unfinished. Waldman's view is the opposite: he describes the songs as highlights rather than offcuts.

After Casal died in 2019, Waldman brought the reels back east and took them to Jeff Hill, who had Casal's Otari in his Connecticut studio. The machine that made the recordings was the machine used to recover them. "We weren't sure if these tapes would still work, having not been played in 25 years or so," Waldman said, describing the moment Casal's voice came out of the first reel.

Eleven of the twelve tracks are Casal originals. The one cover is Tom T. Hall's Joe, Don't Let Your Music Kill You, a choice that reads differently on a posthumous record than it would have when he taped it.

Most of the collection is stripped back and acoustic, including Down With A Friend, Leave My Loving Cup Behind and Where Does The Time Go. Muscatine is one of the exceptions, an electrified track the press materials tie to the Harvest era of Neil Young. It is the sound of a home recordist reaching for a full band arrangement with only himself to play it.

The song carries a video built from footage the director Ray Foley shot of Casal in 1998, which places the images and the recording in roughly the same window. The rest of the tracklist runs through Words and Music, Dark and Dangerous Days, In My Mind, Something You Should Know, It's Got Me Down, How Many Times and Good News.

Casal spent much of his working life as a sideman and collaborator, and archival releases from that kind of career often arrive as live tapes or session leftovers. This one is the opposite: private recordings made alone, with no label waiting for them, which is why they went unheard for so long.

Book Of Stories is on the release calendar for November, and more releases from this corner of American rock sit on our rock hub.