Wake Up the Nation is the tenth studio album from Paul Weller and was released on 19 April 2010. It was nominated for the 2010 Mercury Music Prize. The albums was dedicated to “absent friends – John Weller, Pat Foxton and Robert Kirby”. It is the first of Weller’s albums since 1982 to feature contributions from Bruce Foxton, formerly of The Jam. Weller told Mojo magazine: “We’d both lost loved ones and without getting too spiritual that was the spur of it. I spoke to him this time last year when his wife Pat was ill and that broke the ice, then I invited him down to Black Barn (studio). There was no big plan, it was easy, a laugh, and nice to see him and work together again. We just slipped back into it.” The album has been remixed for the 10th anniversary.
‘The blues come to Texas, loping like a mule,’ Blind Lemon Jefferson sang through a shower of surface noise as he made his recording debut in March 1926. He established the primacy of Texas blues musicians that continued unchallenged for the next 30 years, encompassing the likes of Henry ‘Ragtime’ Thomas, Texas Alexander, T-Bone Walker, Smokey Hogg, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, Clarence Garlow, Lil’ Son Jackson, Lowell Fulson and Frankie Lee Sims. Other famous musicians recorded when they were passing through Texas, and that included Lonnie Johnson, Walter Davis, The Mississippi Sheiks, Robert Johnson, Roy Brown, Joe Turner, Honeyboy Edwards, Memphis Slim and Jimmy McCracklin.
Drew Danner, a crime novelist with a house off L.A.'s storied Mulholland Drive, awakens in a hospital bed with a scar on his head and no memory of being found convulsing over his ex-fiancee's body the previous night. He was discovered holding a knife, her blood beneath his nails. He himself doesn't know whether he's guilty or innocent. To reconstruct the story, the writer must now become the protagonist, searching the corridors of his life and the city he loves. Soon Drew closes in on clues he may or may not have left for himself, and as another young woman is similarly murdered he has to ask difficult questions–not of others but of himself.