Sometimes, in trying times, nostalgia is a balm. It is helpful to forget the woes of the present by falling back on soft down of the past. Music, usually, is particularly good for this. This is to say that maybe – just maybe – some things that we love or find comfort in are better off left as something from the past. Better as a fragment of what has come before to remind us of happier times, rather than having their goodness and pureness brought into the living hellscape that is life as we currently know it. When you take the rose-tinted glasses of memory off, things looks distinctly less flawless.
Ahem. So, anyway: for better or worse, a final TLC album has now been confirmed, with a release "tentatively scheduled" for June this year. The record has been funded by a Kickstarter campaign that was launched in early 2015, as you may have heard, and surpassed its target of $150,000 by almost $300,000.
In an update on the fundraising webpage posted yesterday, TLC's manager Bill Diggins explained that "Tboz & Chilli were inspired to make a record that they could be proud of and they would not settle for less and sometimes you just cannot rush art" – #too #true. Due to an extensive touring schedule, therefore, their plans to release new material sooner were hampered.
But now, finally, the record is well underway, and despite starting the project with "no music, no producers, no writers, and a few ideas" the group will now be confirming the release date "in the next couple of weeks". So now that this is actually, fully, IRL happening, there is only one thing left to say: I hope so badly that it is good. Please be good. All our teen years are counting on it. There's a worry that in situations like this, where fans have asked for a sequel, you've got to not only live up to their expectations but also brace yourself for their opinions on how the album sounds, with the added sense of being stakeholders in the project.In fairness, this premise worked pretty well for the Veronica Mars movie released in 2014 after its own crowdfunding effort – but this is a particularly sensitive situation, with one of the band members gone forever and a massive gap left in her absence. It's up to you to make it work, T and C. I've got my fingers crossed.
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(Image via YouTube)
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