Ratboys are expanding Singin’ to an Empty Chair with a deluxe edition, and the Ratboys Singin’ to an Empty Chair deluxe tracklist is a genuine object of curiosity: five bands covering album songs, plus the Chicago group turning in a version of a track that is very much not their own.
Out 25 September on New West Records, the expanded edition adds covers from PUP, Wild Pink, Ducks Ltd., Bad Bad Hats, and Free Range, each taking on one of the album’s songs and doing whatever they want with it. Ratboys also throw in a cover of their own: a version of Texas punk band the Marked Men’s “Fix My Brain,” recorded for SiriusXM earlier this year.
Julia Steiner on the deluxe edition
Lead singer and guitarist Julia Steiner was characteristically warm about the whole thing. ‘We thought it’d be fun to cover one of our favorite songs and then to ask some of our closest friends and biggest inspirations in music to put their spin on some of our new songs,’ she said. ‘It’s a total trip and such an honor to hear the album songs transformed into something new entirely, and we can’t say thank you enough to our pals for making it happen.’
It reads like a band operating in a genuine community rather than a scene defined by competition. The five contributing acts are not random bookings: they are precisely the kind of overlapping-circle indie-rock names that suggest shared bills, shared vans, and real friendships rather than a label-assembled lineup.
Tiny Desk, tour dates and what the live show looks like
The announcement landed alongside the release of Ratboys’ first NPR Tiny Desk Concert, which gives a decent window into where the band are sitting right now. The set pulled from older material alongside the new record, with ‘Black Earth, WI’ sharing space with ‘Penny in the Lake’ and ‘What’s Right?’ from Singin’ to an Empty Chair. The deluxe version of the latter gets the PUP and Free Range treatment respectively, which adds a certain circularity to seeing them played live in that format.
The Ratboys Singin’ to an Empty Chair deluxe release date of 25 September also lines up with a Nashville show as part of the WNXP Summer Line Series, with a stretch of North American dates running through the autumn. A handful of UK and European shows open the tour cycle, including a Brighton date at Patterns on 9 September and stops at Misty Fields in the Netherlands and Leffingeleuren Festival in Belgium before the band heads back across the Atlantic.
Much of the North American run is with Smidley, the solo project of Foxing frontman Conor Murphy, covering venues across the midwest and south including Chicago’s Salt Shed on 19 December and The 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia on 20 October. There’s also a one-off at Chicago’s The Chicago Theatre on 8 October for the Souvenirs: 80 Years of John Prine event, and an appearance at Corona Capital in Mexico City on 22 November.
The full Ratboys Singin’ to an Empty Chair deluxe tracklist runs to 17 tracks: the original eleven songs, the SiriusXM ‘Fix My Brain’ session, and the five covers from PUP (‘Know You Then’), Ducks Ltd. (‘Light Night Mountains All That’), Bad Bad Hats (‘Anywhere’), Wild Pink (‘Strange Love’), and Free Range (‘What’s Right?’). Seventeen tracks, five collaborators, one band clearly not short of friends in the right places.
