True Believers (John Schumann album)

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True Believers
Truebelieversalbumcover.jpg
Studio album by John Schumann
Released 1993
Recorded September 1992
Studio Hargrave St, East Sydney
Genre Folk
Label Columbia
Producer Mal Logan, John Schumann
John Schumann chronology
Etched in Blue
(1987)
True Believers
(1993)
Portrait: The Very Best of John Schumann
(2003)

True Believers is the second solo album by John Schumann, previously the frontman of Redgum. [1] Released in 1993, [2] it was reissued in 2009.

John Lewis Schumann is an Australian singer, songwriter and guitarist from Adelaide. He is best known as the lead singer for the folk group Redgum, with their chart-topping hit "I Was Only 19 ", a song exploring the psychological and medical side-effects of serving in the Australian forces during the Vietnam War. The song's sales assisted Vietnam Veterans during the 1983 Royal Commission into the effects of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants employed during the war. Schumann was an Australian Democrats candidate in the 1998 federal election, narrowly failing to unseat Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer for the Division of Mayo.

Redgum were an Australian folk and political music group formed in Adelaide in 1975 by singer-songwriter John Schumann, Michael Atkinson on guitars/vocals, Verity Truman on flute/vocals; they were later joined by Hugh McDonald on fiddle and Chris Timms on violin. All four had been students at Flinders University and together developed a strong political voice. They are best known for their protest song exploring the impact of war in the 1980s "I Was Only 19", which peaked at #1 on the National singles charts. The song is in the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) list of Top 30 of All Time Best Australian Songs created in 2001.

Contents

Album artwork

The cover art shows a black and white photomosaic of various famous and influential Australians from the time the album was released, with Schumann in the middle, the only face in color.

Photographic mosaic picture that has been divided into tiled sections, each of which is replaced with another matching photo; at low magnifications, the individual pixels appear as the primary image, while close examination shows that it consists of many smaller photos

In the field of photographic imaging, a photographic mosaic, also known under the term Photomosaic, a portmanteau of photo and mosaic, is a picture that has been divided into tiled sections, each of which is replaced with another photograph that matches the target photo. When viewed at low magnifications, the individual pixels appear as the primary image, while close examination reveals that the image is in fact made up of many hundreds or thousands of smaller images. Most of the time they are a computer-created type of montage.

Track listing

  1. "If I Close My Eyes"
  2. "Leigh Creek Road"
  3. "Fallen Angel"
  4. "Eyes on Fire"
  5. "Working Class Man"
  6. "Roll On The Day"
  7. "Clancy of the Overflow"
  8. "If The War Goes On"
  9. "Hyde Park Calling (King William Road, Scene 1)"
  10. "Plympton High"
  11. "Eyes on Fire" (acoustic)
  12. "If I Close My Eyes" (reprise)

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References

  1. John Schumann official website "True Believers information"
  2. That Striped Sunlight Sound blog True Believers review