Boston band Morphine will release Cocoon, an album assembled from sessions they abandoned in 1998, on December 4 through Partisan Records.
Producer Paul Q. Kolderie and Morphine manager Sabine Hrechdakian, the partner of late singer and bassist Mark Sandman, began transferring the tapes for preservation in 2023. Kolderie made new mixes, while saxophonist Dana Colley added parts to three songs.
Sandman had recorded the material with Kolderie and producer Sean Slade while working on the follow-up to 1997’s Like Swimming. Writer Ryan H. Walsh’s liner notes for the 2023 reissue of The Night describe sessions that moved from Sandman’s Hi-N-Dry loft studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Fort Apache. Label expectations and disagreements over the recordings strained the working relationship between Sandman and Kolderie. Sandman then took charge of the production himself and pursued the songs that became The Night, released in 2000 after his death in July 1999.
Morphine’s familiar setup paired Sandman’s two-string slide bass with saxophone and drums. SPIN reports that piano and acoustic guitar also feature in the Cocoon sessions. Versions of “Tomorrow,” “Patience,” and “Cocoon” appeared on the 2004 Sandman collection Sandbox. Walsh’s liner notes identify those songs with the abandoned sessions, giving listeners earlier versions to compare with the newly mixed album.
Hrechdakian connects the title to the home she shared with Sandman, which doubled as his studio. “Mark loved performing and traveling the world, but he also loved to come home and cocoon,” she says in a release statement quoted by Stereogum. She describes lyrics concerned with separation on tour and the pleasure of returning home. The cover draws on their travels together: Sandman photographed her reflection in a train window on the way to Antwerp in 1998.
Cocoon is available to preorder on vinyl and CD, with liner notes by writer Hanif Abdurraqib and previously unpublished artwork and photography by Sandman.
