Photo by Barbara FG.

Texas Art-Country Legend Terry Allen Announces New Album 

Just Like Moby Dick by Terry Allen & the Panhandle Mystery Band Out January 24

Watch the Album Trailer

Pre-Order Just Like Moby Dick

$10.00 – $41.00

Or support via:  Bandcamp  (all formats/UK shipping) |  Other Options (physical/digital/int’l) | Local Stores

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 etching artwork by Allen. The gatefold CD edition includes a six-panel lyrics insert with different artwork by Allen.

Contingent on manufacturing schedules, we will ship your pre-ordered album approximately a week in advance of the January 24, 2020 worldwide release date. All pre-orders include an immediate 320k MP3 download of lead singles “Death of the Last Stripper” and “City of the Vampires.” For digital-only and UK preorders, please visit Bandcamp (which also offers uncompressed, high-resolution audio files) or your favorite digital marketplace.

Listen to New Songs “Death of the Last Stripper” and “City of the Vampires”

2020 is the Year of the Rat—Papa Rat.

Today, the iconic and iconoclastic Texan songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen announces his heartbreaking, hilarious new album Just Like Moby Dick—a spiritual successor to his 1979 masterstroke Lubbock (on everything)—out January 24. His first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, the album features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Lucinda) and stunning vocal turns from Shannon McNally, as well as co-writes with Joe Ely, Dave Alvin, and Jo Harvey Allen.

In fact, Just Like Moby Dick is the most collaborative album in Allen’s catalog, and includes the adventurous, formidable current iteration of the full Panhandle Mystery Band. 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, plays guitar, sings and co-produced the record with Terry at Austin’s Arlyn Studios.  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.”  

While the connection to Melville’s literary masterpiece are hard to pin down, Just Like Moby Dick shares its namesake’s epic scope and its commentary on the specter of memory and the folly of human existence. 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. It’s a collection befitting Terry Allen’s indelible and influential songwriting legacy, and further evidence that he is, as The New York Times has noted, “pretty close to a master lyricist.” 

Terry Allen & the Panhandle Mystery Band to Play Special Album Preview Show at Austin’s Paramount Theater, January 18, 2020

Photo by Barbara FG.

Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band will play a special show celebrating the coming release of Just Like Moby Dick at Austin’s Paramount Theater on January 18, 2020, with many special guests to be announced soon. Tickets are available here. 

The Whiteness of the Whale

$25.00

Our second Terry Allen t-shirt, the cetacean sequel to “Today’s Rainbow Is Tomorrow’s Tamale,” features—for the first time ever, as far as anyone remembers—an original drawing by Terry himself, of three sperm whales, scarred and freshly harpooned “Just Like Moby Dick,” to commemorate the masterly 2020 Panhandle Mystery Band album of the same title.

Screenprinted by hand, in two oceanic blues, by our eco-friendly focused friends at Print Natural in Philadelphia, these 100% cotton, pre-shrunk, fine jersey short-sleeved t-shirts (BELLA+CANVAS) are available in Vintage White—slightly off-white, the true Mellvillian Whiteness of the Whale hue—sizes XS through XL, in a very limited edition.

Wear while listening to the Panhandle Mystery Band, partying in any port of call with Queequeg and Tashtego, and keep sailin’ on through.

Due to popular demand, we have also reprinted the Terry “Tamale” shirt.

$25.00

Art Exhibition and Documentary Film

Terry Allen, Some Pictures and Other Songs, works in progress, studio view

Just Like Moby Dick is just one of a number of new artistic pursuits from Terry Allen. He just announced an upcoming exhibition of his artwork entitled Some Pictures and Other Songs at Nina Johnson in Miami, running December 2–-February 29. This follows his acclaimed retrospective exhibition The Exact Moment It Happens in the West, which ran earlier this year at L.A. Louver.

[youtube https://youtu.be/y4T26t0eMdQ] 

Additionally, Terry is the subject of a new documentary film directed by Scott Ballew entitled Everything For All Reasons, an introduction to Allen’s music, art, and worldview that features the Panhandle Mystery Band in concert and friends ranging from David Byrne to Kiki Smith. The film will premiere on November 12th at the Violet Crown in Austin; more info about the premiere here.

Pre-order Everything For All Reasons here.

About Terry Allen

Photo by Pino Bertelli.

Terry Allen is an internationally recognized visual artist and songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music. Raised in Lubbock, Texas, he graduated from Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and has worked as an artist and musician since 1966. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Art Fellowships. His work has been shown throughout the United States and internationally, including Documenta and São Paolo, Paris, Sydney and Whitney Biennales and is represented in major private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and L.A. County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (MCASD) and Houston and Dallas Museums of Fine Art. 

Terry & the Twin Towers, 1978.

Allen has released  sixteen albums of original music, including the influential classics Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979), both reissued in 2016 on the Paradise of Bachelors label. His most recent and highly acclaimed Paradise of Bachelors reissue of Allen’s theater and radio work is Pedal Steal (2019). His new album Just Like Moby Dick will be released January 2020, also on Paradise of Bachelors. Allen has collaborated with David Byrne, Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Don Everly, Butch Hancock, Bruce Nuaman, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Lucinda Williams, and his songs have been covered and championed by the likes of Bobby Bare, Ryan Bingham, Richard Buckner, Jason Isbell, Little Feat, Sturgill Simpson, and Kurt Vile. Terry Allen lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, actor and writer Jo Harvey Allen.

Read more about Just Like Moby Dick here.

Read more about Terry Allen here.

Acclaim for Terry Allen

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

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

Terry in Paradise