VIA PRESS RELEASE | Mel, the second East River Pipe album released by Merge Records, will be reissued on vinyl on January 16, 2026, as the label’s first entry in the Secretly Society Record Club.
Going beyond bringing a long out-of-print classic back to wax, the reissue features new liner notes by Barbara Powers and represents the first time Mel has been available in full on any physical format, as “Spotlight,” exclusive to Merge’s 1996 LP and CD, is joined here by “The Way They Murdered Me” and “Miracleland,” which were exclusive to the Shinkansen CD issued outside of North America. Two versions of Mel—a white vinyl edition exclusive to the Secretly Society, and a black vinyl pressing exclusive to Merge Records—are now available for pre-order.
Mel’s inclusion in the Secretly Society series was championed by Secretly Group co-founder Ben Swanson, who had this to say about the album: “In 1996, we were just about ready to put our first two records on Secretly Canadian—Songs: Ohia’s One Pronunciation of Glory and June Panic’s Glory Hole—North Dakota’s answer to the ’90s 4-track revolution. I was only a few weeks into starting my first radio show at WIUS (now WIUX) in the old house (RIP) on IU’s campus. Dozens of CDs that were coming thru the mail slot every day by all my favorite labels—Ajax, Drag City and, of course, Merge—when East River Pipe’s Mel arrived. It was a revelation.
F.M. Cornog’s vocals sit front and center and his arrangements eschew the maximalist-with-minimalist resources tendencies that his contemporaries favored. Mel sounds relatively hi-fi against the Peter Jefferies, Smog, and Guided By Voices of the day. Instead, F.M. leans into the melancholy hooks reminiscent of my favorite ’80s songs—his answer to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time.” Each song is an end credit scene to a movie that doesn’t exist.
While a lot of the albums that came through that mail slot at the station have taken on a “you had to be there” vibe, Mel has aged into my canon of great records from the ’90s. I couldn’t be more excited to have this on my turn table and in my record collection at long last.”
Like all of East River Pipe’s output, Mel was written, performed, recorded, and mixed by F.M. Cornog on a Tascam 388 mini-studio at his home, which was then a small apartment in Astoria, Queens. Within that space, he conjures nothing less than the fullness of life beyond it, the characters and moods of New York, the way a city can feel limitless and isolating all at once.
It’s a daunting accomplishment, one which led The New York Times to call him “the Brian Wilson of home recording.” Mel is an intricately-textured indie pop tour de force, its layers of keyboard and reverb-drenched guitars giving flight to Cornog’s voice, which observes the doomed figures of the city with the intimacy of a documentarian and the egolessness of someone who has been through despair and survived.
Mel is an offering like few others, its 14 peerless gems a direct channel from F.M. Cornog’s heart to yours. Shelter from the storm, you might call it. Uplift for the downtrodden. A masterpiece, even among Cornog’s considerable catalog, this edition of Mel is perfect for both kinds of East River Pipe fans: those who’ve been around for years, and those who didn’t know they needed these songs in their life until now.
