‘Soon’ has been a long time coming. The new album from Scott Fagan has been some 55 years in the making. Its songs, all drawn from the 1971 Broadway rock opera of the same name that Fagan conceived and wrote with songwriting partner Joe Kookoolis, were originally intended as the follow-up to his classic 1968 debut, South Atlantic Blues, but fate intervened.
A radical call-to-arms against the complacency of the modern world, and a tone poem about art, radicalism, commerce, and corruption, the rock opera told an age-old story, of an artist forced to make a devil’s bargain between their principles and success. It drew on Fagan’s own experiences in the music industry, and featured him in the lead role, alongside Richard Gere, Barry Bostwick (later the lead in Grease and The Rocky Horror Show), Joe Butler (of Lovin’ Spoonful), Vicki Sue Robinson, and Peter Allen.
The original Broadway production, subject to creative meddling that compromised its creators’ vision, closed the day after its opening. A year later, it was restaged in Los Angeles for a brief two-week run. Then Fagan’s opus was lost to time. The album was shelved, never to be recorded or heard. Until now.
Recorded over seven days in July 2025 at Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, a hallowed studio that has hosted Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Alex Chilton, and The Cramps among others, the sessions found the now 80-year-old singer-songwriter working with a crack Memphis rhythm section—drummer Terence Clark (Brandi Carlisle, Keith Urban), guitarist Steve Selvidge (The Hold Steady, North Mississippi All Stars) and keyboardist Rick Steff (Cat Power, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Lucero).
The thirteen songs on ‘Soon’, every one a gem, illustrate Fagan’s extraordinary facility and range as a singer and songwriter of great sensitivity, passion, and humour. From its rousing opener, “Let The World Begin Again”, through fiery protest songs, and tender, heart-wrenching ballads, the album is by turns, uplifting, mournful, righteous, giddy, soulful, and anthemic.
First single, “Faces Names and Places”, a rousing rocker calling for a thorough accounting of those responsible for the world’s ills, is a near-perfect fit for the current moment.
It finds its opposite number in “Please Be Well”, the uplifting album closer, an empathetic plea to take care of one’s self in a mixed-up, inside-out world. In an album that feels as if it’s made up of lost classics, the title track “Soon”—a masterclass in classic songwriting that could easily have slipped into Sinatra’s repertoire— may top them all. A ballad about hope, faith, yearning, and the promise of a brighter tomorrow, it’s a song Fagan wrote as a 24-year-old that feels all the more poignant and affecting sung by him now, in the autumn of his years.
Scott Fagan’s own path through the music industry is a tale in itself, one that found him rubbing shoulders with legendary Brill Building songwriting team Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (“Viva Las Vegas”, “Save the Last Dance For Me”, “This Magic Moment”) who mentored and managed him at the start of his career, in the mid-60s; and sharing stages with Jimi Hendrix, Odetta, Ritchie Havens, and Tiny Tim. He had a succession of managers who promised to lay the world at his feet and came up empty-handed; deals with a series of labels—Columbia, Bang, Atco, Epic, and RCA—left a trail of breadcrumbs, in a series of singles that form a small catalogue of largely-unheard masterpieces. Somewhere along the way, he fathered a son, in acclaimed songwriter Stephin Merritt, although the two never met until 2012. Fagan also developed the musicians’ treatment and support program that became MusiCares. But recognition for his music eluded him, until a 2016 reissue of South Atlantic Blues was rightfully heralded as a lost classic.
Where Fagan’s debut dealt with the extreme poverty and privation of his childhood and teenage years, growing up in the US Virgin Islands, the songs he wrote for ‘Soon’ (with Joe Kookolis) cast their net into the wider world. As a songwriter, Fagan was instilled with a purpose, to inform, agitate, and uplift.
Although written over a half a century ago, against the backdrop of Nixon, student protests, Sixties radicalism, and the Vietnam War, these songs are timeless. They speak to the world as it is now, awash with chaos, war, inequities, and inequality, and act as a salve for tired souls, offering some measure of salvation.
Scott Fagan has been waiting a long time for the world to hear these songs. This time is the right time. The long, long wait is over, Soon.
“A star forever in waiting” UNCUT
“Extraordinary” MOJO
“Simultaneously fragile and powerful” SHINDIG!
“Stunning…Fabulous” RECORD COLLECTOR
