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by: Jonathan Bernstein
This fall, Kinky Friedman will be releasing Resurrection, a new studio album of original songs produced by Larry Campbell. After all but retiring from songwriting for three-plus decades, Friedman’s latest album follows in the wake of last year’s Circus of Life, a meditative collection that rejuvenated the Texas singer-songwriter’s drive to make music in his eighth decade. “Circus of Life was more of an intellectual’s record,” Friedman tells Rolling Stone Country. “I mean, I hate intellectuals, but I am one, some of the time.”
Unlike the sparse solo-acoustic Circus of Life, Kinky’s latest is a fully-arranged roots record that Campbell and Friedman made with Americana radio in mind.
“I think a lot of people are going to hear this record, and that will make the Kinkster very happy, or, I should say, will make the Kinkster barely happy,” he says. “You can do something great, but just to get it played on the radio, well, that was Bob Dylan’s original goal, and I guess it’s mine as well. This is the best shot at that happening.”
The accompanying title track to Resurrection serves as a prime example of Friedman and Campbell’s goal to find a wider audience for the 74-year-old singer-songwriter. The song is a charging Texas-country number featuring Willie Nelson joining in halfway through the song to sing with his old friend Friedman:
“What’s in my heart is in my soul is in a day-old donut hole,” Friedman and Nelson sing in the spirited ode to late-in-life perseverance.
To promote the release of Resurrection, Friedman will be touring the United States throughout November, including a date in New York celebrating the legacy of the long-shuttered Lonestar Cafe, where Friedman used to play a weekly show in the Eighties.
Resurrection will be released on October 15th.