He left us aged just 61 in Memphis in August 2006, but Arthur Lee’s legacy as leader of the legendary Love remains immense: 1967’s Forever Changes in particular is one of rock’s true masterpieces. In 2025, that canon will be augmented with Just To Remind You. Billed as the first new Arthur Lee/Love studio album since 1992, it collects material recorded from 1990 to 2005, curated and polished by trusted collaborators.
Suffering from leukaemia and knowing the end was near, Lee gave his wife Diane two CDs of 17 songs, annotated with a red Sharpie and marked with a hand-drawn Love logo and the date, ‘10-22-04’. “Around 2014, Diane had mentioned this project,” says George Wallace of High Moon Records, whose reissues include Love’s lost 1973 LP Black Beauty. “In 2016, she said, these are the songs that Arthur wanted released after he died, and we want you to do it.”
The first released ‘new’ recording was the beauteous Five String Serenade, released in a different form in France in 1992 and later covered by Mazzy Star. The song debuted on Radio 6 Music in time for a July UK tour by Lee-anointed flamekeepers Love with (original guitarist) Johnny Echols. This incarnation of Love, AKA Baby Lemonade, provided the musical backing to Lee’s original vocal and orchestration by Forever Changes arranger David Angel (Diane Lee commissioned the arrangement, and three others, in 2008). “Earlier this year we were down at Sunset Sound studios in Hollywood, where Love recorded their first three LPs,” says Baby Lemonade guitarist Mike Randle. “They had us redo the music, with a little cool Johnny guitar solo, and they synched it all up. Hearing Arthur’s voice again was scary but it was beautiful. And as soon as we walk outside, it starts to rain harder than anything I’ve ever seen in my life. He says that in the lyric, ‘It could be raining…’”
Joe Blocker, who drummed with Love for 1974’s Reel-To-Real, mixed sessions with Wallace at various Los Angeles studios. Yet Wallace says Just To Remind You isn’t a Now And Then-style AI recreation. “Joe knows Arthur’s tastes and inspirations,” he says. “We judiciously embellished – maybe some organ to one song, a mandolin to another, a violin. I felt that we want the opposite way of AI, in a sense. We really didn’t add that much. Five String Serenade is the only one that was posthumously recorded.”
There was, they say, enough there already. Recorded in 2003, Rainbow In The Storm, says Randle, reflects on past times and Love comrades including the late Bryan McLean. He also remembers Lee’s unorthodox guitar solo conducting methods on songs including Love On Earth Must Be and Girl On Fire. “He’d point up and down to make you go higher or lower, and do these Hendrix wiggles when he wanted you to get some vibrato on the guitar,” recalls Randle. “He’d say, ‘Shine, motherfucker, shine!’ I think fans are gonna really appreciate it.”
Wallace describes an eclectic collection, with solo piano, electric blues and funk all representing different sides of Lee. “Where does it fit in the canon? I’m not sure it does,” he says. “But I see it as the actual follow-up to Forever Changes. When Arthur did that, for some reason, he felt like he was going to die, and that these would be his last words. With this album, he knew he was going to die. This is his last musical gift to the world.”
Just To Remind You is due in 2025 on High Moon Records
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