Seasons They Change: The Story of Acid and Psychedelic Folk

In the late 60s and early 70s the inherent weirdness of folk met switchedon psychedelic rock and gave birth to new, strange forms of acousticbased avantgarde 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 shapeshifting experimentation to create sounds of unsettling oddness that sometimes go under the name acid or psych folk. A few of these artistsnotably the String Band, who actually made it to Woodstockachieved mainstream success, while others remained resolutely entrenched underground. But by the mid70s 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 mid2000s 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 reemerged. 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.