Rodney Crowell's "lost" album Then Again set for release in June

Rodney felt the time is right for the songs he cut in 2005 with Guy Clark and Emmylou Harris to be released as Then Again. 

Here's the scoop on Then Again...

“I guess you could call it a lost album,” says Rodney Crowell. “I stumbled upon it in my vault at home. I’d forgotten about it completely.” He’s referring to Then Again, which he recorded and shelved two decades ago before moving off into new directions. Since then, the album has been biding its time, waiting for the moment when its songs would hit hardest. And they hit incredibly hard now, largely because age and experience have granted Crowell a richer perspective. “I’m glad I put it on the shelf, because now is the time for it. It may not be the time for it for the rest of the world, but it’s time for it for me. That’s why I wanted to call it Then Again. I thought that was a clever way of saying that what was happening then is happening now.

Back in 2006, Crowell was in high cotton. He was coming off a trilogy of albums—The Houston Kid in 2001, Fate’s Right Hand in 2003, The Outsider in 2005—that re-established him as a fearless voice in Americana and attracted new generations of fans drawn to his compassionate storytelling, his detail-laden songwriting, and his eloquent outrage over political injustices. In 2005 he went into Treasure Isle Studios in Nashville to record what would become Then Again. But when he heard the masters, something didn’t feel quite right. The band was smokin’ hot and the songs sounded good, but the album just didn’t move him and he struggled to figure out exactly what was wrong or what was missing. Twenty years later, when he found the album in his vaults, he couldn’t remember exactly what tripped him up. He decided it was finally time, if only because “I heard a record I wasn’t sick of. I was no longer sick of myself. That’s what 20 years will do for you.”

Once lost and now found, Then Again is something the Rodney Crowell of the 2000s could never have predicted but something the Rodney Crowell of the 2020s recognizes instinctively: a work of nuance, insight, and sensitivity that considers death but celebrates life. “I’m trying to understand that this spirit of mine is going to leave this body and go off somewhere else. I’ve got a pretty good idea that it’s going to be someplace good, but I still need to perfect some part of my spiritual journey here before I check out. I can see that in these songs now.”

Rodney Crowell's Then Again is out 6/26 via New West Records. Check the tracklisting followed by "Are You One Of Us" featuring the voice of Guy Clark below. You can pre-order copies on vinyl (or CD) right here. 

Rodney Crowell - Then Again

Side A 

I Won’t Lie

Are You One of Us? (feat. Guy Clark)

If I Could Speak To Leonard

Bring It on Home To Memphis

The Ballad of Artemis and Orion

Side B

Sing Your Heart Out (feat. Kieran Goss & Annie Kinsella)

Whatcha Gonna Do Now #2 (feat. Lyle Lovett & Chely Wright)

The Has-Been Vents His Spleen

40 Winters

Go Light a Candle (feat. Emmylou Harris & Lera Lynn)

Nick Fraser's Special Topics @ The Tranzac Club, Monday

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Remembering Italian trumpet titan Oscar Valdambrini on his birthday

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Get your tickets quick for Sunny Sweeney's Toronto show at the Horseshoe Tavern on May 10th right here. 

Happy 80th Birthday Ahmed Abdullah, jazz trumpeter & educator

Recently, trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah spoke about his book A Strange Celestial Road focusing on his time playing with Sun Ra. 

Here's the scoop...

In this captivating memoir A Strange Celestial Road – the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members – Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra. Gigging everywhere from the legendary Bed-Stuy venue the East to the National Stadium in Lagos, Abdullah paints a vivid picture of the rise of loft jazz and the influence of Pan-Africanism on creative music, while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s. Richly illustrated with more than fifty pages of photographs and posters from Adger Cowans, Marilyn Nance, Val Wilmer, and others, A Strange Celestial Road interweaves the author’s own moving story—his battles with addiction, spiritual development, and life as a working class performer—with enthralling tales of tutelage under Cal Massey, collaborations with the likes of Ed Blackwell, Marion Brown, and Andrew Cyrille, and profound, occasionally confounding, mentorship by Sun Ra. Originally written in the 1990s with the help of Nuyorican poet Louis Reyes Rivera and published now for the first time, with a foreword by Salim Washington, A Strange Celestial Road is not only an autobiography, but a history of a remarkable and under-documented movement in music. 

Listen to Ahmed Abdullah's interview with David Mittleman interspersed with some relevant performances on WFMU-FM right here. Also, watch a clip of the One Breath Rising book launch for A Strange Celestial Road followed by Ahmed's discussions of Sun Ra and performance clips. 

Get a copy of Ahmed Abdullah's memoir A Strange Celestial Road directly from the publisher Blank Forms right here.  

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Ahmed Abdullah joined the Sun Ra Arkestra as a trumpeter in 1974 and remained a member for more than twenty years. Born in Harlem in 1947, he became an important figure in the New York loft jazz movement, forming the group Abdullah in 1972, and going on to found the Melodic Art-Tet with Charles Brackeen, Ronnie Boykins, and Roger Blank in the early 1970s and The Group with Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins and Andrew Cyrille in 1986. Abdullah is a co-founder of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium, has been the music director of Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion Dance Company, and is currently music director at the historic venue Sistas’ Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He has been a music instructor at Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and teaches at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and an elementary school in central Brooklyn.

Louis Reyes Rivera (1945–2012) was a Puerto Rican poet from Brooklyn. Known as the “Dean of Nuyorican Poetics,” he led creative writing workshops in community centers and prisons across New York, lectured on Latin and Black diasporic history and literature at New York colleges including Hunter, Boricua, Pratt, and Stony Brook; and was a leader in the 1969 student movement at CUNY, leading to the founding of its department of ethnic studies. Rivera was also a prolific editor, working on books such as John Oliver Killens’s Great Black Russian: The Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin, and a translator of works by Puerto Rican poets Clemente Soto Velez and Otto Rene Castillo. His own poetry collections include Who Pays the Cost (1977), This One for You (1983), and Scattered Scripture (1996), which received an award from the Latin American Writers Institute.