The four-song EP comes in front of Lowe's latest tour with Los Straitjackets -- starting June 22 in Jersey City, NJ -- and represents his first release of new material in five years. "I'd rather gone off the idea of making any more records," Lowe says, partially because of the marketplace and also because touring had become so busy and lucrative recently. Lowe also felt that, "I don't want to be one of those guys who just churns out stuff that's not got much juice in it, one of those old timers. So I wasn't exactly beating a path to the nearest recording studio to inflict my latest stuff on the public. There's such a lot of time and expense in making a record, and I've made so many of them, why would I put myself through them any longer?" Making an EP, however, does return Lowe to the earliest days of his career in England, when "that was a perfectly legitimate thing to do, to just put out an EP."
But, he adds, with a laugh, "I don’t know if anyone buys EPs nowadays -- or albums anymore, right? It seems like sort of a strange thing to do, but everything about the marketing of records nowadays is a complete mystery to me."
The EP does allow him to continue his relationship with Los Straitjackets, which began three and a half years ago with his tour to support his 2013 holiday album Quality Street. "They're an extremely good group, very, very good musicians, and also they're extremely agreeable people to tour with," Lowe says of the masked quartet, which shares the same manager and during the spring of 2017 released the Lowe tribute album What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Los Straitjackets. "The Christmas show was sort of an excuse for us to go out and do a few gigs. It's not very difficult to replace the Christmas songs with some unseasonable material, and it's great to be able to do tunes that I don't do with anybody else nowadays, and that don't really work when I do my solo shows. It's a pretty good rock 'n' roll show we've got." And even better news is that the Lowe-Los Straitjackets association may result in more new music sooner rather than later.
"We're doing another session in June, when I come back to the United States," Lowe says. "So we'll record a couple of new songs and maybe another soundcheck favorite, who knows? I feel like with these guys anything is possible."
