The New Year is Matt and Bubba Kadane, Chris Brokaw, Mike Donofrio and Peter Schmidt. It was formed by the Kadane brothers in 1998 after they disbanded their former group, Bedhead, following three acclaimed albums released in the ’90s. The New Year’s albums include Newness Ends and The End Is Near.
For our first invitational, we gave a group of musicians the following assignment: Create a song based—directly or in the most oblique way imaginable—on public domain material. Some of the participants chose to work from public-domain recorded music purchased for this project, while others contributed unique covers of older traditional tunes.