Ask Me Tomorrow is 4AD's own first pressing of the album since 1995, remastered at Abbey Road and repackaged with new cover photography by Colin Gray, the only title in the label's five-album Mojave 3 reissue campaign to get a new sleeve. (A UK label called Sonic Cathedral pressed a limited run of 500 on sea-foam green vinyl back in 2017, in the original Vaughan Oliver and Chris Bigg artwork, but that sold out fast and never really solved the problem.) The other four records in the campaign, Out of Tune (1998), Excuses for Travellers (2000), Spoon and Rafter (2003) and Puzzles Like You (2006), keep their original covers. All five are out now on CD, standard vinyl and digitally, alongside a 4AD exclusive slipcase box set gathering the whole run on crystal clear vinyl with an 8x10 inch print, limited to 1,500 numbered copies. It's a clean, conservative remaster, more air than volume, the kind that lets a quiet record stay quiet while finally sounding like it has room to breathe.
None of that explains why the record sounds the way it does, though, and that story starts with a band falling apart. By late 1994, Slowdive was already coming apart. Their third album, Pygmalion, had been finished for the better part of a year, an ambient, sample-heavy record built largely in Neil Halstead's own west London flat, and it sat on a shelf while Creation Records tried to figure out what to do with it. Britpop had the country by the throat. Oasis and Blur were about to become the biggest bands in Britain, and here was Slowdive handing in a record that had more in common with post-rock than anything on the radio. Creation finally released Pygmalion on February 6, 1995, then deleted it from the catalog almost immediately. A week later, they dropped the band outright.
By that point, two members had already checked out. Bassist Nick Chaplin and guitarist Christian Savill were both working day jobs and had no appetite for starting over. Rachel Goswell remembers the phone call: Chaplin telling her he and Christian were done, that there was no point continuing. Her answer was simple. She and Neil were going to keep going and see what happened.
What made that decision easy was that Halstead hadn't been idle while Pygmalion sat on ice. He'd started messing around on acoustic guitar in his flat almost as a form of decompression from the abstraction of that record, working through a diet of Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons rather than the effects pedals that had defined Slowdive. He wasn't writing toward an album, just changing worlds for a while. Some of what became Ask Me Tomorrow, including "Love Songs on the Radio," "Sarah" and "Where Is the Love," existed before Slowdive had even finished dying. Halstead simply asked Goswell if she wanted to come sing on it. Drummer Ian McCutcheon, who'd joined Slowdive just before Pygmalion, came along too, along with keyboardist Christopher Andrews.
The band still held a publishing deal with EMI, which meant free studio time. Some of the demoing happened there; some of it happened in far less glamorous conditions. Goswell has described recording her vocal for "Love Songs on the Radio" sitting on a mattress in the second kitchen of Halstead's flat, a detail that says everything about how unceremonious the whole beginning was. Six of those demos ended up on a cassette that made its way to 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell, still labeled Slowdive since the band hadn't renamed itself yet. He was initially reluctant to even put the tape on, given they'd just been dropped by Creation. Once he did, he loved it immediately and wanted to release the six songs exactly as they were. Goswell pushed back and argued for a proper full-length. So the band, now joined by former Chapterhouse guitarist Simon Rowe, went into Blackwing Studios in southeast London and recorded three more songs to round the album out.
They wanted to call the band Mojave, a friend's suggestion, for the wide-open, desert quality of the songs. A German band already had the name. So they added the 3, a nod to the three of them.
4AD signed the trio to a five-album deal, and Ask Me Tomorrow arrived in October 1995, eight months after Pygmalion, effectively facing off with itself in record shops. Where Slowdive had buried Halstead and Goswell's voices under distortion and delay, this was the opposite move entirely: piano, brushed drums, slide guitar, and two voices left almost nowhere to hide. It's since been tagged, more than once, as Slowdive unplugged. Goswell has pushed back on that a little. Her view is that if Slowdive had simply continued as a going concern, this might well have become the next record, but with Chaplin and Savill still in the band, it would have come out sounding like something else entirely. What actually happened was closer to a genuine handoff: a singer-songwriter record built by two people who'd stopped trying to fill space with sound and started trusting the songs to carry themselves.
The band that toured Ask Me Tomorrow kept expanding, adding keyboardist Alan Forrester alongside Rowe, and by 1998's Out of Tune had become a genuine full band working out of a converted cow barn on a farm near Fowey, Cornwall. Goswell has called that record her favorite of the five, largely because it was the one where the whole band lived and played together, pedal steel courtesy of BJ Cole included. But the early touring years were harder than the records let on. On a US press trip for the debut, Goswell's ear burst on a flight between New York and Los Angeles badly enough that the plane diverted to Denver and she was taken off bleeding. She flew on to Europe to start a tour anyway, still unwell, and came home to panic attacks she'd never experienced before. She was eventually diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety stayed with her, on and off, for the next two decades. Years later, a second and unrelated ear condition, labyrinthitis, cost her hearing in her left ear along with lasting tinnitus, and forced a year of balance retraining just to walk in a straight line. It's why she stepped back from Mojave 3's live shows before the band quietly wound down, not a breakup so much as a member who could no longer physically do the job.
Across five albums, the band kept shifting shape anyway: the front-porch folk of 2000's Excuses for Travellers, the banjo-and-Moog detours of 2003's Spoon and Rafter, and 2006's Puzzles Like You, a tighter, more upbeat closing statement written mostly with Halstead out front and Goswell's involvement fading by then. Unlike Slowdive, Mojave 3 never had a hostile UK press to contend with, toured the US relentlessly, and kept getting their album options picked up. Eighteen years of loosely active existence, roughly six times Slowdive's original run, with comparatively little of the mythology attached to it.
4AD had been quietly discussing a full catalog reissue with the band for a couple of years before it became public, work that continued in the background while Halstead and Goswell were focused on Slowdive's own reunion and touring schedule. Mojave 3 has no plans to play any of it live. What's left is the catalog itself, available in full for the first time in decades, tracing a genuinely unlikely arc: two singers who walked out of a band's collapse, sat down with a handful of quiet songs, and spent the next eighteen years finding out what else they could be.
){kind=link}
