Israel Nash to release new studio album Ozarker

Texan singer and songwriter Israel Nash will release his new studio album Ozarker on October 20th on Loose. Recorded with producer Kevin Ratterman (My Morning Jacket, Strand of Oaks, Ray LaMontagne) in his studio in LA, he also mixed and mastered the album. The first single and titelsong of the album Ozarker is out now.

Ozarker is an ode to his roots. But more than that, it’s a meditation on love and family, on the beauty and the pain we pass down through generations, on the ties that bind us through good times and bad. Israel Nash may live in the Texas Hill Country, but he’ll always be an Ozarker at heart. The son of a Baptist preacher and an artist, Nash retreated to Dripping Springs, Texas, where he built his own studio on a ranch and began embracing a more spacious, psychedelic sound that has landed somewhere between Neil Young and Pink Floyd. “I was born and raised in small-town Missouri,” Nash reflects. “All the people and the stories and the music that shaped me come from that part of the country, and I could feel it calling back to me on this album.”

The music here harkens back to the heartland rock that Nash grew up on — Petty, Springsteen, Seger — with larger-than-life guitars and anthemic melodies, and whose lyrics are similarly cinematic, painting captivating portraits of everyday men and women doing their best to get by with dignity and self-respect. “I think the reason so much of that classic heartland rock and roll endures is because it touches on themes we all feel so deeply: desire, struggle, commitment, escape,” says Nash. “As an artist, I’m always aspiring to touch as many people as possible, and that’s what this music has always represented for me.”

Inspired to learn more about his ancestry, Nash reached out to his mother, who began filling pages with her recollections of generations of Ozarkers. Some of the characters featured on this new album come directly from Nash’s own family history, others from second-hand accounts, but all share a distinctly Midwestern resilience, their hopes and dreams and triumphs and failures rendered with great tenderness and empathy.

When it came time to record, Nash spent ten days tracking live at his studio with an all-star band that included My Morning Jacket’s Patrick Hallahan on drums, Bright Light Social Hour’s Curtis Roush on guitar, Floating Action’s Seth Kauffmann on bass, and longtime friend and collaborator Eric Swanson on pedal steel. The result is a lush wall of sound that feels both vintage and modern all at once as it swirls 50 years of American roots rock into a fierce sonic maelstrom.

On 31 August Israel Nash plays a show at TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht (NL)