Nick Lowe Announces New EP, Drops 'Lay It on Me Baby'

has dropped a new song, “Lay It on Me Baby,” off his upcoming EP, Lay It on Me, out June 5th Yep Roc Records.

“Just like a fish in a babbling brook/I’m nibbling at your hook,” he sings over a surf rock riff, backed by Nashville outfit Los Straitjackets. “Don’t let me be the one that got away.”

In a statement, Lowe described the genesis of “Lay It on Me Baby,” which goes back to the late Sixties. “CBS had an inspired idea; they invented the sampler LP,” he recalled. “It was called The Rock Machine Turns You on and consisted of a dozen tracks, each one lifted from the current album releases of 12 of the label’s ‘second tier’ of talent. It was an unashamed promotional device and sold by the truckload. I had a copy, as did everyone I knew.”

“One night in London a few years back, I had Neil Brockbank and Bobby Irwin (my late friends and collaborators), ’round for dinner at my house,” he continued. “During what might be described as the ‘port and cigars’ part of the evening, we found ourselves riffing on the idea of producing a sampler for an imaginary record label of its imaginary artists.

“The next day when the enormous cost and limited commercial appeal of such a project became clearer, our enthusiasm soon waned and most of the fruits of the evening are now lost. Two examples however remain. They are ‘Restless Feeling’ originally written for Coastline and released on Nick’s ‘The Old Magic’ LP] and ‘Lay It on Me Baby’ for Turk Collins.”

Lay It on Me is Lowe’s third EP in two years with Los Straitjackets, following 2019’s Love Starvation/Trombone and 2018’s Tokyo Bay/Crying Inside. It’s currently available for pre-order.