Shine (2025 Remaster) Mother Love Bone

• 1 Thru Fade Away 03:40
• 2 Mindshaker Meltdown 03:47
• 3 Half Ass Monkey Boy 03:18
• 4 Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns 08:22
• 5 Capricorn Sister 05:59
• Total Runtime 25:06

Info for Shine (2025 Remaster)

The debut EP, “Shine” from Seattle’s Mother Love Bone. Fronted by legendary vocalist Andrew Wood, this is one of the key releases that jump started the Grunge Rock evolution. A must have gem from one of the most underrated rock groups of the era.

March 20th, 1989, MOTHER LOVE BONE released their debut EP, Shine, through Stardog/Mercury Records. Mother Love Bone emerged from the remnants of three bands. In early 1988, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Bruce Fairweather had moved on following the end of Green River, while Andrew Wood concluded Malfunkshun, a band that garnered considerable attention in the Pacific Northwest largely due to Wood’s larger-than-life stage presence.

In 1984, Greg Gilmore and Duff McKagan departed Seattle for LA. Following the breakup of their band, 10 Minute Warning, they both opted to seek their fortune on the Sunset Strip. Gilmore grew disenchanted with the LA scene and returned home. McKagan stayed in LA and joined Guns N’ Roses. Upon his return to the Pacific Northwest, Gilmore teamed up with Gossard, Ament, Fairweather, and Wood, leading to the formation of Mother Love Bone.

In hindsight, Mother Love Bone’s “Shine” EP is a remarkable reflection on the crossover of eras and the development of its protagonists’ considerable skills as songwriters. Stone and Jeff were already beginning to establish the signature sound that would later bring them immense success with Pearl Jam’s “Ten.” However, what truly distinguished Mother Love Bone was their larger-than-life frontman.

Recorded in November 1988 at London Bridge Studios in Seattle, most of the songs featured here—except for the eight-minute-long “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns”—draw upon the band’s rawer side. Andrew Wood delivers his vivid lyrics in a tenor reminiscent of Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant and The Cult’s Ian Astbury.

The EP opens with “Thru Fade Away,” featuring Jeff Ament’s feral, pounding bass riff. The band would further refine this sound, but all the elements are immediately in place. “Mindshaker Meltdown” follows, serving as a perfect example of the Mother Love Bone conundrum; the song resembles a lost track from a Faster Pussycat album rather than a band laying the groundwork for a new sound. It brilliantly represents Mother Love Bone’s position in history as the bridge between the ’80s glam scene and the ’90s grunge era.

“Half-Assed Monkey Boy” is a funk-rock epic featuring Stone Gossard’s groove riffing in abundance. While the song maintains a more upbeat nature, its middle-eight breakdown takes a darker turn, revealing the band’s teeth with an exhilarating minor-key sojourn before returning to the love-rock funk and Andrew Wood’s relentless, energised scatting.

Then we come to “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns.” By any standard, it is an incredible song. It should be regarded as two songs sequenced together. The later “Crown of Thorns” section can be found as a stand-alone piece on the band’s sole studio album, Apple, which was released the following year in 1990. The “Chloe Dancer” section that opens the song is not available as a stand-alone track, but when paired with “Crown of Thorns” on the Shine EP, it’s perfection personified—a high-water mark for a scene yet to explode.

“Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” is a hypnotic epic that successfully embodies both blissful melancholy and uplifting, soaring feelings. It’s the Generation X equivalent of “Stairway to Heaven.” Director Cameron Crowe featured the song in his 1989 film “Say Anything…,” yet it did not appear on the film’s accompanying soundtrack release.

Crowe rightly corrected this three years later when he made it the centrepiece of the soundtrack to his 1992 film “Singles.” Of course, Wood himself never experienced the astonishing global impact that his city and friends had on the world in the subsequent years. His tragic death a year after the release of the Shine EP (almost to the day, March 19th, 1990) was a pivotal moment for the burgeoning Seattle music scene.

From his passing emerged an abundance of life-affirming music. Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog might never have come into being, nor songs like Alice in Chains’ “Would?”, which Jerry Cantrell penned in memory of his fallen friend.

The inclusion of “Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns” on the Singles soundtrack in 1992 introduced the band to a new global audience who were unaware that their new favourite band, Pearl Jam, had a remarkable backstory worth exploring. The Shine EP performed strongly upon release, heightening the excitement surrounding the band. They would continue to refine their sound with their debut album, Apple, in 1990, further departing from the ’80s style and, in doing so, becoming the link between what preceded and what was to follow. The Shine EP marked the opening salvo from a young band oblivious to the tragedy about to unfold. Mother Love Bone is pivotal to the story of ’90s alternative rock. Wood’s passing significantly altered the course of popular music at that time.

Andrew Wood, vocals, piano
Bruce Fairweather, lead guitar
Stone Gossard, rhythm guitar
Jeff Ament, bass
Greg Gilmore, drums

Recorded November 1988 at London Bridge Studios, Seattle, Washington

Digitally remastered

Please Note: we do not offer the 192 kHz version of this album, because there is no audible difference to the 96 kHz version!

Mother Love Bone
With one pair of Green River veterans off to form Mudhoney, another two ex-members of that Seattle roots-of-punk combo — guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament — launched a hoary-sounding ’70s hard-rock band, Mother Love Bone. With second guitarist Bruce Fairweather, drummer Greg Gilmore and singer Andrew Wood (formerly the singer/bassist in Malfunkshun), Mother Love Bone made its debut on Shine, an EP whose four tracks shrug off Zeppelin and motorsludge — both common regional tendencies in the late ’80s — in favor of a crisp rip that favors Free, Aerosmith and other blues-based bands of the early ’70s. To its credit, the quintet demonstrates noteworthy songwriting facility and the wisdom to tone things down and open the sound up, giving a genuine three-dimensionality to its creation.

With major-label success looming on the horizon (Stardog being a PolyGram pseudo-indie imprint, named for a song of the band’s) and the Northwest scene nearing critical mass, Wood died of a heroin overdose in March ’90, making the posthumous release of the band’s completed album, Apple, a hollow and meaningless roar. Still, Apple focuses all of Mother Love Bone’s assets into a potent rock rush, like contemporaneous Guns n’ Roses, only with better vocals and worse guitar. When the pain of the tragedy eased and MLB’s legend had grown as a result of subsequent developments, the album and EP were combined on a single disc and reissued as Mother Love Bone, with a bonus CD containing a Shine outtake version of “Capricorn Sister” and the unreleased “Lady Godiva Blues.”

Later in 1990, working on weekends as they developed a new project with guitarist Mike McCready (ex-Shadow), Gossard and Ament — joined by vocalist Chris Cornell and drummer Matt Cameron of Soundgarden — recorded an album in tribute to Wood. Most of the songs on Temple of the Dog are Cornell’s; two (“Say Hello 2 Heaven” and “Reach Down,” eleven minutes of grinding gospel carried by a McCready/Gossard guitar slalom) address his late friend directly. Between such sentimentality, the grim drug reality of “Times of Trouble” and the faith-testing religiosity of “Your Saviour” and “Wooden Jesus,” the album is a powerhouse, with more evocative intensity than either Soundgarden or Mother Love Bone had ever demonstrated. McCready and Gossard play up a furious storm of guitar when needed; Eddie Vedder, who had just arrived in Seattle from California to join their new band, renamed Pearl Jam, sings backup on three songs and shares lead with Cornell on “Hunger Strike.”

Digging back to the scene’s prehistory, a full album’s worth of studio recordings by the Kiss-loving Malfunkshun — Andrew Wood, drummer Regan Hagar (later of Brad and Satchel) and Andrew’s brother, Kevin (who now plays guitar in Devilhead) — dating from 1986-’87 were belatedly dredged up and issued as Return to Olympus. Other than the surprising and bizarre “Enter Landrew,” which throws serious riffology against a credibly fey vocal imitation of Marc Bolan, the Zepped-out trio makes obvious, retrograde rock noise (“Jezebel Woman”), even going so far as to cover Ted Nugent’s “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.” But at least one song in this pile — “Luxury Bed (The Rocketship Chair)” — has a rhythmic component that has since become very familiar to fans of Northwest rock.[Ira Robbins]

This album contains no booklet.