Seasons They Change: The Story of Acid and Psychedelic Folk (Genuine Jawbone Books) - Softcover

A year-round companion for freak-flag wavers everywhere... Carefully researched and littered with interviews, Seasons They Change achieves the impossible in drawing together the myriad, disparate stands of a genre which, in its heyday, was usually dismissed as a blot on the landscape. It's only in hindsight that acid-folk is now recognised and appreciated in its own right. --Mojo, February 2011

The fascinating story of experimental folk music over the past 40 years is the subject of this excellent book by historian, DJ and writer Jeanette Leech... Jeanette's book is not only a history of the fall and rise of folk music but also sets the music in its wider social and historical context. --Choice magazine, February 2011

Labour-of-love survey of acid folk, from Davy Graham's altered tunings to Joanna Newsom's celestial harpings... a singular, exhaustive and, you feel, personal mission to tell the story of acid folk... an engaging celebration of music from the fringes, and all the tears and joy that go with it. --Record Collector, February 2011

In the late 60s and early 70s the inherent weirdness of folk met switched-on psychedelic rock and gave birth to new, strange forms of acoustic-based avant garde music. Artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Incredible String Band, Vashti Bunyan, Pearls Before Swine and Comus, combined sweet melancholy and modal melody with shape-shifting experimentation to create sounds of unsettling oddness that sometimes go under the name acid or psych folk. A few of these artists - notably the String Band, who actually made it to Woodstock - achieved mainstream success, while others remained resolutely entrenched underground. But by the mid-70s even the bigger artists found sales dwindling, and this peculiar hybrid musical genre fell profoundly out of favour. For 30 years it languished in obscurity, apparently beyond the reaches of cultural reassessment, until, in the mid-2000s a new generation of artists collectively tagged 'New Weird America' and spearheaded by Devendra Banhart, Espers and Joanna Newsom rediscovered acid and psych folk, revered it and from it, created something new. Thanks partly to this new movement, many original acid and psych folk artists have re-emerged, and original copies of rare albums command high prices. Meanwhile, both Britain and America are home to intensely innovative artists continuing the tradition of delving simultaneously into contemporary and traditional styles to create something unique. "Seasons They Change" tells the story of the birth, death and resurrection of acid and psych folk. It explores the careers of the original wave of artists and their contemporary equivalents, finding connections between both periods, and uncovering a previously hidden narrative of musical adventure.