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When The B-52s ended their “farewell” tour in January in Athens, lead singer Fred Schneider teased the crowd with a cryptic exclamation: “See you in Vegas!”
The message was clear that the band, formed in Athens in 1976, had no intention of disappearing into retirement in 2023.
“The show definitely signified an end to things — whether it means that night or a few months from now,” B-52s co-founder Cindy Wilson said earlier this month. “So it could be the end of touring or the end of that show itself. But we still have a lot of things to do. I mean, really, are we going to go out with a bang or a whimper?”
The Vegas gig turned out to be a residency at the Venetian Resort in May. The appearance was so well-received that the band has been invited back for an encore run from Friday through Sept. 3 and then again in April. So will that be the band’s final curtain call?
Not quite yet, Wilson said. “Thank God, we’ve all taken pretty good care of ourselves and we still love to play. But you know, we’re not getting any younger, and pretty soon we’re going to have to stop. We’ve been very lucky. We’ve had a few hits. We’ve been able to get our creative ya-yas out, and we’ve done our own things, too. So we’ve got the whole bag, really.”
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
Credit: Ryan Fleisher
The first night of their Vegas engagement will be a particularly special one for the Athens native. As Wilson revisits her band’s greatest hits on the massive Venetian stage on Friday, her new solo album will be released worldwide via indie label Kill Rock Stars.
“I think it’s a great convergence,” she said with a laugh. “I mean, if you’re going to celebrate, it might as well be in Las Vegas, right?”
“Realms,” the singer’s latest collection of solo material, is her first batch of new music since her 2017 debut LP, “Change.” Produced by Athens-based electronic musician Suny Lyons, “Realms” focuses on Wilson’s musical influences, layering the tracks with innovative psychedelic elements.
It’s the latest phase of a leisurely paced solo path that began more than 20 years ago, with the blues-based Cindy Wilson Band. The group included her husband, Keith Bennett, on keyboards and 40 Watt Club co-founder Paul Scales on harmonica. Her band played a number of well-received live gigs in Athens, Atlanta and Macon, yet it would be another decade and a half before Wilson opted to release any official recordings. By 2016, she was fully immersed in the electronic scene with her first two EPs: “Sunrise” and then “Supernatural.”
“It’s all part of the journey,” she said. “Everything I’ve recorded has led to ‘Realms.’” The album, informed by her love of artistic experimentation and pure pop songcraft, exists in its own heady universe. She’s scheduled to talk online about “Realms” in between Vegas shows at 9 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 31, on talkshoplive.com.
“It’s definitely not a pop record, but it still comes from that place. Then we take it much further out of the usual song structure,” she said. “That’s one reason why it took a while to finish — well, that and COVID.”
During the pandemic, Wilson and Lyons continued working on the project, albeit sporadically. “Suny had to take on a lot of responsibility,” Wilson said. “He had to take on being a creative, a producer and even art director for this album.”
The result is her strongest work to date, with 10 tracks that traverse an otherworldly soundscape that ranges from ambience to angular pop to techno and even to futuristic disco on the lead single, “Midnight.”
Credit: Courtesy of Kelly Bugden and Keith Bennett
Credit: Courtesy of Kelly Bugden and Keith Bennett
“It’s all over the place, really,” she said, chuckling. “But that’s where our head was when we were making it. Suny was very conscious of the era I grew up in, which is new wave and punk, so we were adding a lot of that feeling into the mix — which I thought was really clever. And yes, there’s even some disco on it. It represents a lot of interesting blends of the things I love.”
Her familiar vocals anchor the percussive terrain. Yet even though she has used her distinctive sonic instrument since the 1970s, Lyons challenged her range.
“We had to experiment on what were my strongest points as a vocalist because we didn’t want it to sound like anything else. We even worked on a glockenspiel for some of the melodies, just so I’d be more precise. But he embraced my more dissonate stuff, too. Sometimes I love harmonies that are a little bit off-center because I think that makes it interesting.”
They built off what they’d created on “Change.”
“It really grew from there,” Wilson said, adding that she’s enjoyed listening to repeated playbacks of the new album. “Usually when I finish an album, I’m ready to move on, but I am really proud of this one. I’m not tired of hearing it at all.”
While the best of The B-52s material is more traditionally orchestrated, “Realms” eschews guitars for broad synth washes, courtesy of Lyons.
“When the B’s write, we jam until it works. But with this, it was a whole different thing,” she said. “I told Suny, ‘You’re going to be listed on the album as doing everything’ because it’s like he just did it all.”
Wilson, of course, contributed lyrics and vocal concepts — with a few notable contributions from B-52s touring drummer Sterling Campbell and in-demand string player Maria Kindt.
“It was all very organic,” Wilson said, when pressed about the songwriting process for the album. “Songs would just morph from one thing to another as we went along. They went through a lot of changes and conjuring to get to where we are now. But then, so have I. So I guess it all works out.”
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