From Here To Now

2015 reissue of 2009 solo album by Julien Barbagallo of Tame Impala. Barbagallo was born to Sicilian immigrant parents in the pastoral landscape of the Tarn river basin in Southwest France, where he still lives at the time of this release. His first EP, My Bungalow (Barbabungalow), marked the beginning of his Lecube solo project, and lent him mythical status via the only French magazine that got hold of it, Magic. With a simple eight-track machine and a few intimate songs, Barbagallo began telling the stories he held closest to his chest, a fragile combination of glances and breaths randomly collected on local buses and unmade beds. He took his songs on stage with a band for a year, playing the 20 or so venues that used to be the pride of Greater Toulouse, before the 2001 chemical plant blast put the city back to sleep. Barbagallo also became a full-time member of bands that were signed and so playing further afield, including Paul Stuart and the Sweet Powerpack, with which he played keyboards, and Hyper clean, with which he played drums, while using his own material on an album collaboration with Laure Briard. In the spring of 2004 Barbagallo began to record material on his friend Benjamin's staircase, a collection of songs which were to become From Here to Now; stories in which women he'd love to love meet men he'd love to be, and vice versa. These recordings remained on the stairs until Barbagallo played a local party where he met Stephane Bismuth of Megaphone Music (Michael Head & The Strands, Angil, Karen Dalton), who convinced him to release his songs as a series of 7s. Those tracks drew comparisons to The Monochrome Set, Neutral Milk Hotel, Bob Dylan, Syd Barrett, The Byrds, Elliott Smith, Howe Gelb, and a dodgy Stephen Malkmus, among others. From Here to Now's eight tracks include five from those 7s. Barbagallo has since returned to rummaging around suburban trash cans and trailing through Tarnish countryside woods and adolescent bedrooms, gathering sensations and stories to sing about.