Leaving behind your 20s does something to a man. He takes stock and, if he’s Sondre Lerche, releases his entire back catalog on vinyl (for the first time) and issues a live album, “Bootlegs.”
Then he hits the road for a four-week retrospective tour that begins in his adopted hometown, New York City, on his 30th birthday.
“The show will be a great celebration with my audience. It feels like a natural way to celebrate it. It’s what I do and how I live,” says Lerche. “Maybe I’ll have a party afterwards.”
Then he remembers he has a show here in Boston the next night.
“I’ve got some schedule,” he says. “Really, this tour is prolonging the celebration of my 30th birthday for a whole month.”
Another neat life marker is that “Bootlegs” features recordings from his native Bergen, Norway, and various clubs in Brooklyn, where he has lived since 2005. A songbook featuring sheet music for all his songs completes his retrospective.
“The songbook took me years to do because I can’t read or write music, so I had to get help from various scholarly friends. It all makes for a new and interesting way to look back at my first 10 years without putting out a boring ‘best of’ album.”
Lerche’s backing band on this tour is also the opener, Fancy Colors, which features members of Jupiter One, Of Montreal and CHAPPO.
“New musicians bring out something new,” says Lerche. “Fancy Colors went back to the original recordings to learn the songs, so they are more aware of things in them that we want to hold onto, because I might have lost sight of them.”
