Faith No More Give Tender-loving Care to “We Care a Lot” Reissue

For many, Faith No More didn’t begin until they became synonymous with the fish out of water in the music video for what remains the group’s biggest hit, “Epic.” Of course, the seeds of Faith No More were sown years earlier, and two albums preceded 1989’s The Real Thing, from which “Epic” derives. The first of those two albums, We Care a Lot, was released in 1985 but has been out of print for 20 years.

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All that will change, however, on August 19 when Faith No More will reissue a remastered version of the album, complete with nine bonus tracks, via bassist Bill Gould’s Koolarrow Records.

According to Gould, the band was amid recording their 2015 reunion album, Sol Invictus, when he stumbled upon the master reels for We Care a Lot in his basement. “I saw one two-inch reel and some half-inch reels,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I bet these are the original masters from the recording session.’ I didn’t know I had them.”

Next Gould took portions of the reels to Fantasy Studios, near Gould’s Bay Area home, to see what remastering the reels might yield. He was impressed with the initial results, so decided to hit up We Care a Lot producer Matt Wallace to see if he’d like another go at the album. “I asked him, ‘if you could remix them again now, what would you do?’” Gould says. “’Just mix it the way you’d wanna hear it in 2016.’”

“We always thought [We Care a Lot] was a little primitive, but rightly so considering when we did it,” he says. “We just thought if we could do it we should do it.”

Gould says the new version—which will be available on CD, vinyl and digitally—sounds “a bit fuller. It’s not as overly bright, but it’s got a certain depth to it. I like listening to it. It sits right with me.” In addition to the original 10 tracks, the remastered version will include four original demos, two songs recorded live at San Francisco’s now defunct I-Beam in 1986, and 2016 remixes of the title track, the instrumental “Pills for Breakfast” and “As the Worm Turns.”

Promoting the album with, say, live shows could prove tricky because We Care a Lot singer Chuck Mosley was replaced by Mike Patton after the album’s follow-up Introduce Yourself. That said, Gould says the band has “a couple ideas but nothing we want to talk about just yet.” And, he says, Mosley is “totally into” the project and that they’re “talking a lot” with him about it.

As far the status of the band—which came off tour in October following a triumphant tour in support of Sol Invictus—Gould is equally mum. “I can’t really answer, actually,” he says. “Right now I’m kind of focused on [We Care a Lot].”