© Texas Tech Public Media, 24 Frames
Executive Producer: Paul Hunton
Production Director: Jonathan Seaborn
Produced by: Paul Hunton, Jonathan Seaborn and Daniel Ballard
Shot by: Daniel Ballard, Victoria Lawson, Duncan Stanley, and Hannah Westbrook
Edited by: Daniel Ballard
Sound by: Kolit Asdo
“Seminal 70s recordings Juarez and Lubbock (on everything) are resolute, meant to be absorbed in their entirety. With humor and a gift for songwriting, each finds Allen subtly giving the middle finger to any and all expectations of what Country is or should be.” – Aquarium Drunkard
“The path that Allen chose was even wilier [than his country music contemporaries]: smuggling his outsider storytelling into the art world, leaning on his gnawing Texas twang to ground his imaginings in an uncivilized landscape. With Juarez, he conjures a still-Wild West, at once romantic and grotesque, nourishing and mystical, and complete with a colorful quartet of characters.” – Jewly Height, NPR Music
“People tell me it’s country music, and I ask, ‘which country?’” – Terry Allen
Terry Allen’s first two albums are both critically acclaimed classics and outliers in the 70s country music canon. They are representative of the man who made them—rambunctious and unflinchingly original, never bowing to convention while sounding entirely timeless. As a label whose aesthetic is intimately tied to the Allen legacy, we are thrilled to reissue these records in new definitive editions this year, in close collaboration with Terry. Juarez, Allen’s 1975 debut, will be released May 20th, with Lubbock (on everything) to follow in the fall.
PRE-ORDERS:
$10.00 – $42.00
Other ways to purchase this release: iTunes | Amazon | Bandcamp
Texas Monthly has shared a new video of Allen and his sons Bukka and Bale performing “What of Alicia,” one of the narrative hinges of the Juarez cycle, earlier this year at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. TTU recently honored influential Lubbock natives Terry and his wife Jo Harvey with the inauguration of The Allen Collection, an extensive archive to house artwork and ephemera by both artists. Allen’s legacy as a visual artist is just as legendary as his music, with works included in the collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, and other world-class institutions.
The video demonstrates Allen’s continued vitality and the enduring power of his songs.
Recently NPR Music wrote about Juarez centerpiece “Cortez Sail”, which you can read and listen to HERE.
You can listen to the remastered 1975 album version of “What of Alicia” here:
“Allen’s songs extract strangeness from the known world and use it as a means of acquiring greater knowledge. This is an old man’s confirmation of a young man’s speculation, which is as good definition of wisdom as any. [Juarez is] a series of beguilingly off-kilter songs about Texas, California, and Mexico, held together by spoken interludes that gave it the feel of a movie.” – The New Yorker
“His catalog, reaching back to 1975’s Juarez, has been uniformly eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural.” – Rolling Stone
“Nobody else does country music like Terry Allen… There’s not a wasted word or extraneous musical lick” – Los Angeles Times
“A masterpiece, one of the great songwriter records. It stands equal with classics like Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Newman’s Good Old Boys, and it stands equal (or above) any made in the decades since.” – Dave Alvin
