Multi-platinum, GRAMMY Award-winning artist EVERLAST is back, today (7/20), with a politically charged new single, “The Culling.” The rapper and singer-songwriter brings his trademark rasp and flow with a dystopian vision that drives the song over a subtle dark beat. The song marks the lead single from WHITEY FORD’S HOUSE OF PAIN, his first full-length studio album of original material in seven years that’s due September 7 via Martyr-Inc.
Pre-order for WHITEY FORD’S HOUSE OF PAIN is available now with the instant-grat track “The Culling.” Pre-order the album here and click here to listen to “The Culling.”
EVERLAST says that “The Culling” is one of his “chain-of-thought songs like ‘Black Jesus’.” The song’s message blasts “lying politicians” while warning about threats to our freedom. “When politicians talk/Assume they’re lying/Living on your knees/Much worse than dying…”
WHITEY FORD’S HOUSE OF PAIN is his seventh solo studio effort overall and first studio album of all-new material since 2011’s Songs of the Ungrateful Living (2013’s The Life Acoustic was re-recorded solo guitar versions of previously released songs). The 12-song collection offers an eclectic stylistic sampling from throughout EVERLAST’s nearly-three-decade-long journey.
There’s the self-analytical “The Climb,” a song which in part references his own defenses as well as his eight-year-old’s ongoing battle with cystic fibrosis, one of the chief reasons behind the long gap between records (“To pay for my daughter’s medication/I’mma sell you a piece of my salvation”). Watching her suffer fuels his anger and challenging of God’s existence in album opener “One of Us,” while the dirty delta blues of “Slow Your Roll” suggests a dark glimpse of a world and a growling vocal hook provided by Aloe Blacc, taking us back to EVERLAST‘s underground hip-hop roots.
The album’s centerpiece, “Summer Rain,” is a sprawling, cinematic, Beatles-meets-Tom Waits-meets Neil Young glimpse into the horrors of drug addiction, with “Dream State,” co-produced by Alchemist, a sly stab at the back-stabbing treachery and Faustian pacts of the music business. EVERLAST also offers up a “Jump Around”-style party song in the rousing “Smokin’ & Drinkin.'”
“I just used everything in the tool box,” EVERLAST says humbly about WHITEY FORD’S HOUSE OF PAIN, adding that his family’s ordeal managing his daughter’s illness has given him “a whole different license to learn how to live.”
Track listing for WHITEY FORD’S HOUSE OF PAIN:
“One Of Us”
“The Culling”
“It Ain’t Easy”
“The Climb (Interlude)”
“The Climb”
“Slow Your Roll featuring Aloe Blacc”
“Smokin’ & Drinkin'”
“Oooohh (I Don’t Need You) featuring Slug”
“Summer Rain (Interlude)”
“Summer Rain”
“Don’t Complain”
“Break It Down”
“Break It Down (Interlude)”
“HeartBeat”
“Dream State”
ABOUT EVERLAST:
You can call him EVERLAST, Whitey Ford or even Erik Francis Schrody, but by any name, this singer-songwriter-rap legend’s remarkable music career has seen him reinvent himself several times over. From his first solo album, Forever Everlasting, under the auspices of Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate when he was barely out of his teens, to the “Jump Around” success with House of Pain, the multi-platinum Whitey Ford Sings the Blues (and its genre-bending hit single, “What It’s Like”) and his Grammy-winning contribution to Carlos Santana’s Supernatural album (“Put Your Lights On”), EVERLAST has defied the naysayers. Along the way, he has forged a groundbreaking merger of hip-hop, rock, folk, funk and R&B, influencing everyone from Kid Rock and Colt Ford to acolytes like Yelawolf, JellyRoll and Lil Wyte, even if he’s too modest to say it himself.
For more information on EVERLAST, visit:
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Influencing Kid Rock rofl. Other way around. Kid Rock started in 82.
Kid Rock was 11 years old in 1982, troll.