The Steve Miller Band will mark the 40th anniversary of its iconic “The Joker” album today with a release of “The Joker Live,” a partnership with Kobalt Music Group’s AWAL digital platform.
The new album, which features exclusive, unreleased tracks, is now available in the U.S. at all digital service providers, including iTunes, and on CD from Amazon.
Said Miller: “When several friends and colleagues reminded me that it was the 40th birthday of ‘The Joker’ album, I smiled — and started playing the whole album’s songs live again — and at the end of the last tour realized we had a great new record that we wanted to share with our fans. We hope you like it as much as we did playing and recording it.”
The original 1973 studio album, “The Joker,” featured the chart-topping single title track. The song is regularly covered by popular artists and licensed in the media. Johnny Depp recently quoted lyrics from it in the movie “Dark Shadows.”
The new release coincides with the band’s sold-out co-headlining 2014 tour with Journey, which kicks off today in Chula Vista, CA at the Sleep Train Amphitheater. The Live Nation tour brings together three of the most celebrated classic rock groups that helped define the “San Francisco Sound” — Steve Miller Band, Journey and Tower of Power — to 41 cities across North America including Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Toronto and Detroit.
Miller, whose many hits include “The Joker,” “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Jet Airliner,” “Abracadabra” and “Rock N Me,” released 21 albums of original material and has performed thousands of concerts. He has been awarded the ASCAP Golden Note Award, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the RIAA’s highest certification — the Diamond Award — and most recently the Texas Medal of Arts. The Steve Miller Band Greatest Hits is also listed in the RIAA Top 100 Selling Albums of all time.
Kobalt Music Group’s AWAL is a digital distribution and marketing company which offers a straight to market solution for artists, and was created to empower content owners to take control of their digital business. The company has provided global distribution and marketing services to a vast range of labels and artists, including Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead, Beck, Moby, Eddie Izzard,Chaka Khan, Frank Turner, AR Rahman and Passenger, among others. Kobalt provides multi-rights coordination, royalty accounting, advanced data analytics and its staff to manage releases.
- This article originally appeared in THR.com.