Nashville-based honky tonk performer Chuck Mead has announced plans for his new album Close to Home, his first full-length release since 2014s Free State Serenade. The LPs head-bobbing title track is out today.
Mixing a groove thats part-T.Rex stomp and part-outlaw country swagger, Close to Home comes with a generous helping of pedal steel, a twanging baritone guitar solo and Meads philosophical musings on situations that align themselves beautifully. In one instance, a story of infidelity begins to seep out as Hank Williams voice wafts in from the adjoining room, as if decreed by some greater consciousness. Mead recorded the album in Memphis with Matt Ross-Spang, who previously helmed albums by Margo Price and John Prine.
I called the record Close To Home because the phrase has different meanings to the whole piece, says Mead. The song itself is about those weird instances where you think of a person or mention them and suddenly they present themselves. Or maybe youre experiencing some sort of event in your life and suddenly there is a book or a song or movie that lines up perfectly with the situation. Its not quite synchronicity. Im sure scientists have a name for it. But its something that makes it seem theres some cosmic frequency that were all on and the possibility that there is some sort of order to the universe.
Close to Home will be released June 28th via Plowboy Records.