Iconic and iconoclastic Texan songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s heartbreaking, hilarious new album, his first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Blaze), Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka Allen, Richard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines; and co-writes with Joe Ely and Dave Alvin. The connections to Melville’s masterpiece are metaphorical and allusive, as elusive as the White Whale. The masterly spiritual successor to Lubbock (on everything), Just Like Moby Dick casts its net wide for wild stories, depicting, among other monstrous things, Houdini in existential crisis, the death of the last stripper in town, bloodthirsty pirates (in a pseudo-sequel to Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the “American Childhood” suite), a vampire-infested circus, mudslides and burning mobile homes, and all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells.
Highlights
- Terry Allen’s first album of new work since 2013’s Bottom of the World
- Featuring contributions from the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Blaze), Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka Allen, Richard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines; and co-writes with Joe Ely and Dave Alvin.
- The deluxe tip-on gatefold 2×LP package features lyrics, color labels, high-res Bandcamp download code, three sides of music, and a fourth-side vinyl Moby Dick etching artwork by Allen.
- The gatefold CD edition includes a six-panel lyrics insert with different Moby Dick artwork by Allen.
- RIYL: Dave Alvin, Ryan Bingham, David Byrne, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Guy Clark, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Little Feat, The Flatlanders, Blaze Foley, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Jason Isbell, Robert Earl Keen, Kris Kristofferson, Shannon McNally, Geoff and Maria Muldaur, Willie Nelson, Randy Newman, John Prine, Doug Sahm, Charlie Sexton, Bill Joe Shaver, Silver Jews/Purple Mountains, Sturgill Simpson, Kurt Vile, Jerry Jeff Walker, Lucinda Williams, Townes Van Zandt.
- Artist page/tour dates/back catalog
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Tracklist
A1. “Houdini Didn’t Like the Spiritualists” 4:05
A2. “Abandonitis” 3:59
A3. “Death of the Last Stripper” 3:20
A4. “All That’s Left Is Fare-Thee-Well” 3:07
B1. “Pirate Jenny” 5:20
B2. “American Childhood I: Civil Defense” 2:33
B3. “American Childhood II: Bad Kiss” 3:37
B4. “American Childhood III: Little Puppet Thing” 2:24
C1. “All These Blues Go Walkin’ By” 3:22
C2. “City of the Vampires” 3:57
C3. “Harmony Two” 5:45
C4. “Sailin’ On Through” 4:03
D. M.D.
Catalog Number/Release Date
PoB-055 / January 24, 2020
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- Photo by Barbara FG.
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- Photo by Chris Phelps.
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- Photo by Barbara FG.
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- Terry & the Twin Towers, 1978.
“Laughter is just a slowed down scream of terror.” – Thomas Disch
Terry Allen’s 2019 retrospective exhibition, The Exact Moment It Happens in the West: Stories, Pictures, and Songs from the ’60s ‘til Now, at his longtime gallery L.A. Louver, surveyed the celebrated artist’s over fifty-year career bridging the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music. (Allen himself is suspicious of all such labels, famously asking, “People tell me it’s country music, and I ask, ‘Which country’”) The show concluded with a recent, and ongoing, body of work entitled MemWars—Terry likes puns—that deploys a three-channel video installation and drawings to examine nine indelible episodes from his life that have informed his influential songwriting. The real-life characters who inhabit the picaresque stories he tells (alongside his wife and collaborator of fifty-eight years, the actor and writer Jo Harvey Allen) may have monstrous names—The Wolfman of Del Rio, The Gorilla Girl, Monkey Man, Headlight Woman, the Burn Couple—but, like all of us, they have endured mundane and all-too-human pain. MemWars concerns the mirages and ravages of memory, the fragmented ways we remember, and are remembered. It is Allen’s essential subject matter, refracted kaleidoscopically through a multiplicity of media.
Appropriately, then, his heartbreaking, hilarious new album Just Like Moby Dick, his first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, takes its title from the archetypal monster of American literature and the American imaginary. (Coincidentally—or not—his label Paradise of Bachelors also takes its name from a Herman Melville story.) “Memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights,” Melville writes, and for most of the novel, Moby Dick himself remains hidden, haunting Ahab as a crystalline monster of fathomless memory, a terrible fever dream from the depths. The whale remains a specter on Allen’s record too, appearing explicitly only in the briny final line of the last song “Sailin’ On Through,” and on the artist’s Side D vinyl etching and CD insert drawings, where he lurks menacingly beneath the roiling seas of Thomas Chambers, the 19th-century maritime painter whose floridly freaky nautical scenes adorn the album jacket.
The connections to Melville’s 1851 masterpiece are metaphorical and allusive, as elusive as the White Whale. The masterly spiritual successor to widely acknowledged art-country classic Lubbock (on everything) (1979), Just Like Moby Dick casts its net wide for wild stories, depicting, among other monstrous things, Houdini in existential crisis (“Houdini Didn’t Like the Spiritualists”), “The Death of the Last Stripper” in town, bloodthirsty pirates (in a pseudo-sequel to Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the “American Childhood” suite), a vampire-infested circus (in “City of the Vampires”), mudslides and burning mobile homes (“Harmony Two”), and all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells. It begins graveside, with Houdini alone with his ectoplasmic doubts in “the silence of the night” (another “noiseless twilight”). It ends with death too, old friends fading into “ashes, dust, and songs.”
Fortunately, Just Like Moby Dick features friends in spades, including the full Panhandle Mystery Band in its current, formidable iteration. It is the most collaborative album in Allen’s catalog and arguably his most sonically rich and varied as well. Terry shares keyboard duties with his son Bukka Allen, who also plays accordion and piano. Pedal steel master and de facto Panhandle bandleader Lloyd Maines contributes slide guitar and dobro, while Richard Bowden brings his characteristically kinetic and lyrical fiddle; both musicians have appeared on every Allen album since Lubbock (on everything). The brilliant Charlie Sexton, a veteran of Bob Dylan’s bands since 1999—he’s also played with David Bowie and Lucinda Williams and stars as Townes Van Zandt in Ethan Hawke’s 2018 Blaze Foley biopic—co-produced the record with Terry at Austin’s Arlyn Studios, plays guitar, and sings. Drummer Davis McLarty, a Mystery Band mainstay since Human Remains (1996) is joined by more recent rhythm section additions Glenn Fukunaga (bass) and Brian Standefer (cello). Terry’s other son Bale Allen sits in on djembe on “Abandonitis.”
The most clearly transformative new presence here, however, is Shannon McNally, who sings sublimely throughout, taking lead on “All These Blues Go Walkin’ By” and Jo Harvey’s jazzy “Harmony Two” and duetting with Sexton on “All That’s Left Is Fare-Thee-Well,” making this the only Allen album to cede lead vocals to other performers. Just Like Moby Dick is also unusual in featuring five songs co-written, in various permutations, with fellow travelers Joe Ely and Dave Alvin, as well as Sexton, McNally, and three other talented Allens (Jo Harvey, Bukka, and Bukka’s son Kru), largely emerging from 2018 songwriting sessions hosted by the Crowley Theater and Hotel St. George in Marfa, Texas. The satirical triptych “American Childhood” includes two previously unrecorded 2003 songs, “Civil Defense” and “Little Puppet Thing,” related to Allen’s DUGOUT project, depicting a childhood in the shadow of Cold War atomic terror. They bookend “Bad Kiss,” in which a high school girl enlists, leaving home and an abbreviated romance for the war-torn Middle East. But history repeats itself in an endlessly stuttering cycle of brutality and death: “It’s just the war/Same fucking war/It’s always been/Never ends.”
“It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,” reveals Ishmael in Moby-Dick. He reels off a litany of possible reasons—scientific, symbolic, cultural—why that might be, but it all boils down to absence, to blankness and emptiness. Pirate Jenny’s ship and flag may be “as black as her past,” but white is the color of death and surrender, of ghosts and the void—a symptom of “Abandonitis,” that American disease. “All good luck has death in it” reads one of Allen’s blood-red drawings in The Exact Moment It Happened in the West, emblazoned beside a broken wishbone. So do most good jokes, most good songs, most wisdom. Memory shoots her crystals as clear, white ice.
Videos and Streaming
Acknowledgments
Just Like Moby Dick finds Terry still plowing forward, finding new ways to marry his personal memories to more universal concerns about looming catastrophe and societal decay. The lyrics… concern ghost ships, vampires, Facebook and the war in Afghanistan. In 2020, no veteran country songwriter sounds more attuned to the national mood. His songs still feel like little guidebooks for staring down a harsh universe.
– Washington Post Magazine
With a masterful blend of allegorical lyrics and honky-tonk hooks, the artist and musician Terry Allen has been steadily solidifying his stature as a reigning deity of a certain kind of country music since the mid-70s. His sophomore album, Lubbock (on everything) (1979), is my personal favorite… but his newly released album, Just Like Moby Dick, could make me rethink my rankings. Recorded in Austin, Texas, with an all-star cast of musicians and co-produced by the venerable Charlie Sexton, the record shows off Allen’s gravelly but warm voice as it he spins dark tales of life and death, inflected with dry wit and backed by a soft pillowy bed of twang.
– New York Times T Magazine
8/10 (Lead Review). Still weird and wonderful … One of outlaw country’s strongest and oddest talents returns. It has always been a fool’s errand to frame Allen in terms of other artists—there was nobody like him before he showed up, and the subsequent 40 years have been equally light on plausible peers. Just Like Moby Dick reconfirms Allen as one of Americana’s greatest indefatigable mavericks.
– Uncut
Terry Allen [is] the kind of singular American artist who expresses the fundamental weirdness of his country. There’s a wistfulness to Just Like Moby Dick that emphasizes the timeless quality to all his albums—not in the sense that the music will last, which is likely, but for the way they all revive memories. The album underlines Allen’s uncanny, mysterious balance of humor, tragedy, and a kind of just-folks plainness… a set of tall tales for strange times.
– The Wire
Delectably barbed country songs … too good to miss.
– The New York Times
Whatever medium Allen works in, his robust sense of humor is often evident. Although individual paintings, sculptures, installations or songs may by turn capture anger, righteous indignation, confusion, whimsy, curiosity or joy, the connective thread is a cynicism-free sense of wonder Allen seems to maintain in his journey through life — and his abiding empathy for the foibles of his fellow human beings.
– Los Angeles Times
T is for Texas. It’s also for Terry Allen, the state’s best-kept secret—notwithstanding the efforts, over fifty years, of Lowell George, Guy Clark, David Byrne, and Kurt Vile—the legendary renaissance maverick of the Southwest.
– MOJO
4 stars. Just Like Moby Dick shares Lubbock‘s predilection for mixing humor with horror—never judging its cast of cracked characters but never averting its gaze from the tragedy that unfolds. Another chapter in a book that never gets dull.
– Record Collector
Phenomenal… endlessly fascinating and moving songs. Most songwriters wouldn’t even conceive of songs on topics like Harry Houdini’s battle with spiritualists, a stripper’s demise, or a vampire carnival, let alone be able to pull them off. But for Texas legend Terry Allen, it’s all par for the course. With this exceptional album, Terry Allen has reestablished the fact that he is indeed an artist of significant consequence, and one of the most formidable figures making music today.
– American Songwriter
5 stars. If Willie Nelson is the outlaw king of Texas music, Allen is the Lone Star State’s poet wizard, framing parables that cross the ages, containing sharp wit and hard truths. Even if you’ve never heard Allen’s previous work, this is a great place to dive in and become acquainted with his rich, funny, amazingly detailed and emotionally resonant magic.
– Daily Mirror
Terry Allen hits a late career peak with Just Like Moby Dick. It’s almost not fair, this band he’s assembled.
– Austin-American Statesman
4 stars. The cult country icon and artist surveys disasters with a comic eye…creating a world of shuffling balladry and mysticism.
– The Guardian
With the help of collaborators, the 76-year-old songwriter takes what would be another great, narrative album set to the familiar rhythms of a country waltz and brings it to new places… At a time when crisis mode feels like the new normal, Just Like Moby Dick is worthy of an earnest listen. Perhaps the serene perspective Allen embodies is only available to those—like fellow songwriters Randy Newman and John Prine—who have lived long enough to witness tragedy become comedy. He doesn’t dismiss the calamities we face; life’s not a complete joke. But when it strikes you with a thousand harpoons, what choice do any of us have but to carry on as best we can?
– Pitchfork
The new album unfolds a universe all its own, balancing the deeply familiar with the bizarrely uncanny in its distinct mix of honesty and humor. Hinging on vivid characters and narratives, with ordinary lives often wrung extraordinary through ferociously poetic wordplay and expansive humanity, his discography presents a uniquely Southwestern mythos unfurled in the contradictions of the landscape’s endlessly expanding horizon. It’s a world that beckons for escape, but paralyzes with a beauty that blooms against devastating vastness – a tension of movement and minutiae.
– Austin Chronicle
Though it would be near impossible to claim any one of Allen’s records as his pièce de résistance, his latest album Just Like Moby Dick — his first original collection since 2013’s Bottom of the World — may vie for that title.
– No Depression
4 stars. Like a smart, funny musical without a stage.
– MOJO
5 stars. Whisper it loudly, for this just might be Terry Allen’s most consummate album ever. How many other artists could channel Brecht, Beefheart, Waits, and Marc Almond into on breath? Allen’s musicology is clearly boundless… His passion still blazes. Much like Moby-Dick the novel, Just Like Moby Dick offers the idiosyncratic work of an individual genius.
– RnR
8/10. The twenty-first century Allen is the same one that first brought surrealism and country music together in the 1970s. Nothing is revealed.
– PopMatters
It feels strangely appropriate that Terry Allen would choose perhaps the most grandiose, the biggest, of American narratives as the namesake for his latest musical endeavor. He takes those myths and that iconography and those traditions and plays with them so that they are never rendered unfamiliar in the final product, rather they glow with a new light. That Allen is able to continue to do this 45 years on from when he first introduced us to Sailor, Spanish Alice, Jabo, and Chic is as moving and mystifying as that big Texas sky.
– Dusted
Allen’s songs extract strangeness from the known world & use it as a means of acquiring greater knowledge … which is as good definition of wisdom as any.
– The New Yorker
He’s pretty close to a master lyricist.
– The New York Times
Riveting.
– NPR
Stunning.
– Pitchfork
Aural brilliance.
– The Wire
It’s reassuringly colorful in scope and tone, Allen bringing his customary wit to vividly detailed songs.
– Uncut
Uniformly eccentric & uncompromising, savage & beautiful, literate & guttural.
– Rolling Stone
Allen carries the dust of West Texas in his throat, with a voice like a coyote’s yip & a twang like wind-thrummed barbed wire.
– Bandcamp Daily
There may be no greater maverick in all of country music.
– AllMusic
A true legend & a hero. I love Terry’s music so much.
– Kurt Vile
Just the sort of bitterly funny, tragicomic masterpiece we’ve come to expect. Like Cohen, Zevon, and John Prine, when you listen to Allen you feel you’re listening to someone with the sort of insight into the human condition not given to mere mortals. It’s not always comfortable, and it’s occasionally brutal… but it’s always wise to pay attention.
– Shire Folk
Despite the leviathan title, the venerated Texas artist’s steel-polished melodies conjure tequila nights, desert vistas and psychedelic illuminations. It’s a mordant, sharply etched, thought-provoking ramble through love, war, natural disasters, dead friends, vampires, pirates, and Houdini’s search for ghosts he didn’t believe.
– Pasadena Weekly
His best work yet. On his new album Just Like Moby Dick, Allen not only stands out in a sea of pop driven country music, he proves that there’s still a place for great storytellers. The album plays out like a narrative for a film that hasn’t been made yet.
– Closed Captioned
A witty, insightful and musically infectious album with songs that more than stand comparison with his early greats, at 76 Allen proves you’re never too old to lead from the front.
– Folk Radio UK
Impossible to define… an ensemble of imagination and quick wit masked in terror.
– Country in the UK
Quirky, wry and whimsical … a record of both darkness and light, frivolity and seriousness … well worth your time.
– Lonesome Highway
Terry Allen proved long ago that he is a maverick beyond measure and one our best storytellers. This is stuff that will have you laughing, crying, and mostly shaking your head, thinking who else could possibly come up with these stories and these lyrics.
– Glide Magazine
Terry Allen is a scoundrel, an enigma, and a walking contradiction. He is a treasure. And at age 76, he has just released his most cohesive record in decades, Just Like Moby Dick.
– Routes and Branches
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