Mojave 3 - Excuses For Travellers (2026 Remaster) Mojave 3

Mojave 3’s founding members are vocalist/guitarist Neil Halstead, bassist/vocalist Rachel Goswell, and drummer Ian McCutcheon. The band broke cover in 1995, when a six-track demo impressed 4AD sufficiently to offer them a deal, despite a then-prevailing musical climate of bumptious Britpop that seemed totally at odds with what Mojave 3 were doing. Their incongruence was hardly surprising given that Halstead, Goswell and McCutcheon had formed as members of definitive shoegazers Slowdive, while guitarist Simon Rowe had previously served with dreampop kindred spirits Chapterhouse.
Mojave 3’s debut, Ask Me Tomorrow, was a refreshingly stripped down collection that changed little from the original demos. Halstead’s melodic, folk- and country-tinged songs drew favourable (if lazy) comparisons to Nick Drake, Cowboy Junkies and Bob Dylan. Three years later, Out Of Tune continued where the first album left off and showed a group that had grown in both confidence and cohesiveness. Third album Excuses For Travellers contained some of the most ambitious Halstead compositions yet. Spoon and Rafter followed three years later marking another shift for the band. While still containing echoes of singer-songwriters and alt-country, the record represents a technicolor expansion of their palette that utilizes electronics, glockenspiels, melodica, and Beatlesque production. Their final album, 2006’s Puzzles Like You is a positively bright and fun record that feels right at home next to indie rock contemporaries like The Shins and Band of Horses, while sounding nearly unrecognizable next to the band they were on Ask Me Tomorrow.

With the band returning to London to work and live at the famed Fortress studios, Excuses for Travellers was the first of two consecutive albums recorded with the help of friend and electronic artist Mark Van Hoen. Combining the melancholy and stripped-down intimacy of Ask Me Tomorrow and the Laurel Canyon soul of Out of Tune, it finds the band refining their touch to create a more cohesive record that rightfully sits at the middle of their ever-morphing sound.

“With Out of Tune I was sort of obsessing a little too much over Bob Dylan and Neil Young,” says Neil, “whereas on Excuses for Travellers the influences had been absorbed a little more, and the band made it into its own thing. Mark’s production really helped as well.”

Lusciously textured with restrained guitar, drums, pedal steel, horns, and piano, it’s an introspective campfire record that lets Neil’s voice and songwriting take centre stage (“In Love with a View,” “My Life in Art,” “She Broke You So Softly”), while also featuring the only two Mojave tracks solely credited to Rachel (“Bringin’ Me Home”) and Ian (“Got My Sunshine”).

Reflecting on his growth as a songwriter, Neil says, “Unlike Slowdive, where the music is at the forefront and nobody is focusing on what anyone's saying, you couldn’t really hide the lyrics with Mojave 3. I had to think about them more, work harder on them.”