best news ever: edwyn collins

In what essentially amounts to the Greatest Music News of the Month, post-punk legend, post-pop smartass and all around Lion of the Industry Edwyn Collins is recovered enough from his terrifying 2005 cerebral hemorrhage to play a handful of shows in the United States. There’s only a few of them — March 13th at Brooklyn’s the Rock Shop, the 14th at the Bowery Ballroom, and then the 16th through the 19th at SXSW, but the fact that Collins is well enough to perform live at all is — truly — miraculous.

It is impossible for me to overstate my love for Collins. From his early years with Scottish trailblazers Orange Juice — a group whose whole foppish frontman/tangle of guitars aesthetic the Smiths more or less nicked entirely — to his acrid, cutting solo albums, Collins perfected a combination of hyper-literacy with pure pop savvy that remains a band apart, even from the legions of young musicians he’s inspired. In March, he’ll release his excellent seventh record Losing Sleep, on which he’s joined by a host of indie luminaries — Alex Kapranos and Nick McCarthy from Franz Ferdinand, Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame, Johnny Marr, Ryan Jarman from the Cribs and Jacob Graham, Connor Hanwick and Jonathan Pierce of the Drums.

You can watch the first single from the record above. And if you haven’t heard it yet, take a few minutes to listen to “The Campaign for Real Rock,” still the best takedown of simplistic Rockist! ideals ever committed to tape (“You’ve just been to an all-night party/ where I have to admit it takes pluck/ to go out on the floor and proclaim ‘What a bore’/ in a t-shirt that reads ‘Disco Sucks.’”)