Out now, Big Big Train‘s Digital Deluxe Edition of Woodcut features not only the award-winning, international progressive rock band’s 16th studio album, as released earlier this year, but also demos of each track from the album, as well as two acoustic tracks.
Released via InsideOutMusic, Woodcut marked the band’s first ever full-length narrative concept album, exploring creativity, sacrifice and the thin line between inspiration and madness. With regards to the new deluxe edition, lead vocalist Alberto Bravin said: “The demos featured on the digital deluxe version of Woodcut are the final ones that I put together shortly before we went into Sweetwater Studios in Fort Wayne in the USA in April 2025.
“While we had the overall shape and flow of the album largely worked out before we started recording, there were some significant musical developments at Sweetwater. File sharing has a role to play, but creatively nothing can rival the seven of us all playing in the same room together, interacting and sparking off each other with arrangement and performance ideas.”
Bassist Gregory Spawton added: “With this digital release, we wanted also to take the opportunity to make live acoustic versions of a couple of key Woodcut songs available. Back in February this year, Alberto, our violinist Clare Lindley and I performed two short acoustic in-store sets in the UK to mark the release of Woodcut. We really enjoyed doing so and might consider more acoustic performances at some point down the line.”
One of those live acoustic tracks is ‘Chimaera‘.
Big Big Train will perform a warm-up show on Thursday 24th September at Thornden Hall in Eastleigh, UK, to kick off The Woodcut & Other Stories tour. It will be the first of 19 shows across the UK and Europe this autumn, where the band will play this year’s acclaimed Woodcut album in full, as well as over an hour of other material from their extensive back catalogue.
For more about Big Big Train and their UK tour at RAMzine, click here.
