He’s making the music he wants while continuing to please the people who want to hear where his artistic journey takes him next. On what’s now his 10th studio album, he not only does that, but he did it in his own organic and authentic way. In classic Boland fashion, The Light Saw Me tackles stories and themes that are integral to his writing beyond his world-class use of metaphors, like who we are, where we’re going, and whether love is something that people feel internally or just connected to consciousness and humans’ fear of their own mortality.įor most of his career, the only thing you could expect from Boland is to do the unexpected. Hidden behind the grandeur of the storyline, the message that Boland aims to share is a universal one: Everyone and everything is connected by love. Packed into three distinctive interlocking parts, The Light Saw Me is layered with vivid imagery that touches on old legends (such as a spacecraft allegedly crashing in Aurora, Texas), conspiracies, and other accounts that run contrary to reality. On the surface, The Light Saw Me traces a cowboy living in Texas in the 1890s who is abducted by aliens and ends up in Texas in the 1990s, but there’s way more to it. Once again teaming up with his frequent co-conspirator, Grammy-winning producer Shooter Jennings, Boland hunkered down in a Los Angeles-area studio to bring The Light Saw Me to life. Titled The Light Saw Me, the acclaimed singer-songwriter decided to go deeper than he’s ever gone before to create a multi-layered sci-fi concept album. At a time when pandemic albums are popping up left and right, Boland zigged when everyone else zagged. In early 2021, the time felt right to get the project rolling again. However, that session took place a day before the lockdown and put the kibosh on the project for a year. Strumming through the material with the Stragglers at a rehearsal in Colorado, Boland knew he had something big. The groundwork he laid in 2019 saw the singer-songwriter roll through songs that would be a bold step forward. Prior to the pandemic, Boland was hard at work on his most ambitious project yet. Add to that the legions of musicians who are influenced by Boland, and his impact on the scene is undeniable. From his early days touring in cramped vans and playing in front of tiny bar crowds to the packed venues he performs in today, Boland’s uncompromising approach has grown his profile dramatically, especially in the past handful of years.
Millions of fans cheering him on, over 500,000 records sold independently and 10 albums later, Boland is a career musician whose legacy continues to grow. These disparate influences don't just offer APOCALYPSE WHENEVER an expanded palette of sonic choices to color Bad Sun's airtight hooks - they help give the songs an emotional complexity that works on a multitude of levels depending on how listeners choose to receive them.įor the past 20 years, Jason Boland & the Stragglers have dazzled audiences all over as one of the leading ambassadors of the Oklahoma and Texas music movement. "We also knew we wanted the album to have a through-line, a story from beginning to end," frontman Christo Bowman explains, so the band did what any good directors would: They assembled a mood board, filtering their neo-noir version of Los Angeles through the dreamlike haziness of author Haruki Murakami, the futuristic flair of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Blade Runner, and the lifted cinematography of Spike Jonze's HER.
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Conceived as "the soundtrack to a movie that doesn't yet exist," the 13-track album, helmed by longtime producer Eric Palmquist (MUTEMATH, Thrice) at his Palmquist Studios and the band's North Hollywood rehearsal spot, is more conceptually rigorous than anything they've ever attempted - but no less compelling or accessible. Portrait Of A Legend 1951-1964 īad Suns sound - dreamy '80s pastiche flanked by Stratocasters through cranked Vox amps, pulsing synths, and palpable rhythmic energy - that endeared listeners to the band in the first place, and their fourth LP, APOCALYPSE WHENEVER, uses that musical foundation as the jumping-off point for their next evolution.