Frank Zappa For President is seeing a new physical release. The 2016 compilation highlighting the idiosyncratic artist’s most political works has been set for a new vinyl pressing that will also include unreleased compositions Frank Zappa put together on his Synclavier synthesizer.
The album, one of Zappa’s countless official posthumous releases, features songs like “When The Lie’s So Big,” “Amnerika,” and the aptly-named “‘If I Was President…’” (As the title suggests, Zappa would in fact go on to consider a presidential run of his own in the 1990s, although it never came to fruition. As he told the San Diego Tribune in 1991, his curiosity in a run was piqued by Democratic consultant Raymond Stohrer’s assertion that only an outsider could come in and change the race.
The record received its most recent vinyl pressing in April, an extremely limited release that debuted as part of Record Store Day 2024. The release, like this one, was purposefully scheduled to coincide with the 2024 election. Now, the album will again be available as a 3-side 2LP, filled with material from Zappa’s vast vault that speaks to his view of politics. A silk-screened image can be seen on the final, fourth side of the LP.
The new announcement follows last week’s reveal of another major Zappa re-release: a super-deluxe 50th-anniversary edition of his most successful strictly commercial album, Apostrophe (‘), due out September 13th. First released in 1974, the release marked Zappa’s first-ever certified Gold album and peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The super-deluxe edition with arrive with a 53-page booklet contributed to by veteran British music journalist Simon Prentis and Zappa’s Vaultmeister, Joe Travers.
