Phil Selway releases Familial, his first solo album

Familial, the first solo album by Radiohead's drummer Phil Selway, is out today in Britain on Bella Union, and tomorrow in the US on Nonesuch. The opener, “By Some Miracle”, came first, given away from his website on 30 June for an email address, and NPR has streamed the whole album since 22 August.

On the record Selway sings and plays acoustic guitar, with Lisa Germano, Wilco's Glenn Kotche and Pat Sansone, and Sebastian Steinberg, once of Soul Coughing, on bass. I've made this record more or less at the midpoint of my life⁷, he told NPR. The songs are about growing older and about family, hence the title, and at times about fear and depression. If stuff came up that sounded very 'Radiohead,' I'd edit it out⁷, he said, though never at the cost of something that was genuinely him.

He has already started touring it, at Duo Music Exchange in Tokyo last Thursday and Club Quattro in Osaka the next night, with Adem Ilhan, Caroline Weeks, Kath Mann and Alex Thomas in his band. Ireland's Electric Picnic follows on 4 September, then British dates, with three nights opening for Wilco from a sold-out Royal Festival Hall in London on 14 September.

In Tokyo, SPIN reports, he greeted the crowd with And welcome to our quiet night in.⁶ He introduced Thomas as there to show him how a real drummer does it, and bowed a xylophone on “Slide”. In about 80 minutes he played all ten of the album's songs and several more; one of them, “The River”, he announced as his newest. The encore was the Velvet Underground's “Pale Blue Eyes”, which he joked he had written for Lou Reed in the 1960s.

Setlist, Duo Music Exchange, Tokyo, 26 August 2010

“By Some Miracle”, the official video by David Altobelli, the opener of Familial, September 2010· Philip Selwaywatch on youtube →