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| Listen to "Sleeping Without You Is A Dragg" off Swamp Dogg's new country album, Sorry You Couldn't Make It out March 6th. |
Legendary soul singer/songwriter and producer Swamp Dogg has just announced that his new album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, produced by Ryan Olson (Poliça), will be released on March 6th, via Joyful Noise Recordings and Pioneer Works Press. First single “Sleeping Without You Is A Dragg”—featuring piano by Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and backing vocals by Jenny Lewis and Channy Leaneagh (Poliça)—is out now. Watch the lyric video directed by Jacob Graham below.
The follow-up to 2018’s critically acclaimed, Olson-produced Love, Loss, And Auto-Tune—Swamp Dogg’s first album to debut on 11 Billboard charts (including at #7 on 'Heatseekers’) and his first chart ink since his 1970 song “Mama's Baby - Daddy's Maybe”—Sorry You Couldn’t Make It allows Jerry Williams, aka Swamp Dogg, to finally dive into the sound he grew up playing: country. With the support of Pioneer Works Press, they recorded the album at Nashville’s Sound Emporium backed by a crack studio band led by Derick Lee, a keyboard virtuoso who worked as the musical director of BET’s Bobby Jones Gospel Show for nearly four decades. Nashville guitar firebrand Jim Oblon combusts his way through lead duties, while frequent collaborator Moogstar and other special guests John Prine, Chris Beirden of Poliça, and Sam Amidon join the action throughout.
While the 77 year-old Williams’ most enduring persona is the psychedelic soul superhero Swamp Dogg—a musical vigilante upholding truths both personal and political since 1970’s immortal album, Total Destruction To Your Mind—he will tell anybody who will listen that he’s considered himself country this entire time. “If you notice I use a lot of horns,” Swamp says. “But actually, if you listen to my records before I start stacking shit on it, I’m country. I sound country.”
A band of 14 players, including Vernon, Lee, Beirden, and Moogstar, among others, provides the background for Swamp’s devastating new take on his biggest hit, 1970’s “Don’t Take Her (She’s All I Got).” Written with his best friend Gary U.S. Bonds, the track is country in that woeful, underdog-baring-their-soul sort of way that for some reason only country songs really ever allow themselves to be. Freddie North covered it first and made it a Top 40 pop song, but Johnny Paycheck took it all the way to #2 on the country charts in 1971. He duets with country-folk legend Prine on two songs (“It’s the first time I seen John since the sixties!” laughs Swamp): the indelible, psychedelic ballad “Memories” and the reflective “Please Let Me Go Round Again.” Originally written and demoed in his forties, “Please Let Me Go Round Again” is a plea for one more chance at life, sung with acute emotional connection.
These are narratives about love, of missing the one you love, of compassion, family and friends, and even the kind of love that transcends death. Sorry You Couldn’t Make It sees Swamp come full circle, and closes what has felt to him like unfinished business. “They didn’t have any blacks in country until Charlie Pride came along,” he says. “But in time, all things change and that's what has happened to country music.” Surveying today’s Nashville reality, Swamp sees opportunity: artists as divergent as Darius Rucker and Lil Nas X are converging in a genre that he once worried might never give him his shot. “I'm anxious because it's like I've taken all my money and put it on one horse,” he says. “But I believe in this horse.”
Swamp Dogg – Sorry You Couldn’t Make It
1.Sleeping Without You Is A Dragg
2.Good, Better, Best
3.Don’t Take Her (She’s All I Got)
4.Family Pain
5.I Lay Awake
6.Memories (feat. John Prine)
7.I’d Rather Be Your Used To be
8.Billy
9.A Good Song
10.Please Let Me Go Round Again (feat. John Prine)
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