Mojave 3 - Out Of Tune (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.

After playing with the band on their first tours of the US and Europe, Simon Rowe and organ/piano player Alan Forrester had joined the group full-time for the next record, essentially turning Mojave 3 into Mojave 5. Not only that, but the four men in the band also moved into a farmhouse in Cornwall, building a small studio in a cowshed where they demoed songs for what became Out of Tune.

“It was a real communal experience living on this village farm with Ian, Alan, and Simon, and a few other friends,” says Neil. “It was our own little Big Pink.”

“That was a real Band-y sort of atmosphere,” agrees Ian, “very old school, with everyone learning their parts and playing at the same time. Our sound became bigger, more raucous and poppy, as a result.”

“I was living in London and coming down to stay for a few weeks at a time,” says Rachel. “We were young and just really having fun with it.”

Based on his work on Belle & Sebastian’s If You're Feeling Sinister, the band hired producer Tony Doogan and decamped to Cava Studios in Glasgow to properly record Out of Tune, which turned into a long process of remixing, rerecording, and adding new elements like pedal steel and brass. While the procedure was laboured, the highly polished result is a bright, largely upbeat record that showcases a new sophistication in Neil’s lyrics while sounding much more like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Gram Parsons than anything resembling Slowdive.