Now performing under the mononym Thao, the artist has released “Show Me,” an album she calls “a real-time record-keeping of my life evolving into a different relationship with love and desire over the last few years.”

The album, out today, is her first since 2020’s “Temple,” the final stanza of the Get Down Stay Down era. For “Show Me,” Thao rejoined the Kill Rock Stars label and invited Tune-Yards, The Linda Lindas, Neko Case and Adrian Quesada of Black Pumas to contribute.

The lack of output since “Temple” should not be taken as a hiatus. In the gap before today’s release, she guest hosted the “Song Exploder” podcast and PBS’s “Southern Storytellers” and developed a musical.

On the occasion of “Show Me’s” debut and a short run of dates, including Unicorn Bar in Kingston on Nov. 11 and Mercury Lounge on Nov. 12, Nguyen answered a few of our questions via email. She’ll mount a full tour early next year, including a stop at the Bowery Ballroom on Feb. 27.

Did retiring the Get Down Stay Down name have an impact on how you approached making this album? 

Not consciously, but I do think this new album is the mark of a new era for my life personally and professionally, and retiring that name was marking the natural end of some things, both personally and professionally. 

What did you learn about yourself as you made the album?

I learned that I am after a different kind of honesty and vulnerability, and that I’m a lot less guarded than I used to be. And also I tapped into patience and self-belief reserves I didn’t realize had been building over these last few years.

Are there specific emotional challenges, such as having to let your defenses down, that come with working with collaborators on such personal material?

Yes, there are potential challenges and I use them to help me determine who to work with and when to work alone. If I’m comfortable enough going where I need to go with these songs and this material with someone in the room, then it works. If not, I’ll do the work on my own and invite them back in for other parts of the process. Some people like my friend/fam Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards can always be in the room whenever she wants. 

Heading into the midterms, how politically active do you plan to be? What are the most important issues to you right now?

I plan to be as active as is sustainable, with the knowledge that midterms are huge yes but staying engaged and active beyond what might and might not happen is just as vital. 

Re: issues- just to name a few: the fragility of and the protection of our democratic process, immigrant/ refugee rights in our country, and climate catastrophe. 

What will the fall shows be like? Solo, full band, guests, etc?

Full band, full joy, and some guests in select cities and hopefully hopefully the whole crowd letting loose with us.

“My sister and me in a New York City apartment, getting by on our own until our parents came home from work late at night,” Knight explains. “Vanilla cones, Johnson’s on the corner after school, a black-and-white TV.”

“Our Home” makes its exclusive debut at Highway 81 Revisited today.

The single is part of “Homework,” Knight’s debut album, which he says is about “going back through my past to finally process it, from a mattress on the floor with my wife to Henry Street and a partner who left without an explanation.”

The album, out Nov. 6, is an acoustic indie folk release built on Knight’s vocals as well as guitar, piano, strings bass and cajon.

You can find Peter online at his website and Instagram.

In “Liminal Space,” they ask, “How do we make the garden safer?”

It’s a dangerous world, and the band, comprised of new parents, are full of questions. Call “Softy” a soundtrack of self-doubt.

“It has shaped the album with some kind of sensibility,” says Viemose, one the band’s two lead vocalists. “Towards our children, how do we act like we know what we’re doing? The responsibility that you have when you have kids to both take care of yourself and also take care of them, and then also trying to be in this world that is kind of full of things that you can’t really defend. You sort of have to be the shield in a way when you have children, and at the same time you should also be vulnerable in front of them.”

The ethical conundrums do not come with conclusions: “The lyrics are not certain of anything,” she continues. “It’s something that I guess I’ve sort of become more OK with. They don’t come with some kind of statement.”

“Softy,” out Oct. 30, is Lowly’s fourth LP for Bella Union, the esteemed UK indie label run by Simon Raymonde, of Cocteau Twins renown, and the first one that Viemose, Nanna Schannong (vocals), Kasper Staub (synthesizer), Thomas Lund (bass) and Steffen Lundtoft produced themselves. Working and living together at summer houses in Denmark brought an immediacy to the process compared to releases like 2022’s “Keep Up the Good Work.”

“I think the last album, we love it, but we called it like a layering cake, where you record a lot on top of each other, and we weren’t as much in the studio together as we could have been,” Viemose says. “And we had Anders [Boll] our producer, who was sort of the anchor of the record, and then we sort of shifted between like visiting him, but we weren’t really so much together in the studio with him.

“[For Softy], I think we just had a feeling of we really wanted to be together for these songs and maybe also kind of accept the songs for what they were, not having this FOMO feeling sometimes, or could we make the song even greater if we put on strings or did like a big, big production on this? We could just see that the songs were all right as they were. Also maybe because we had played them so much together, that was also a value in itself.”

In January of 2026, Lowly received a cosign from Brian Eno, a longtime champion of the atmospheric art pop outfit, when he chose their song “baglaens” to close his “Records The Changed My Life” presentation at the Serpentine Galleries in London.

“We were very, very excited about it, and also it’s just a very surreal kind of acknowledgement to get from this person that we are looking so much up to, and he’s such a fantastic person,” Viemose says. “It’s just very absurd. And we haven’t met him. We are sort of trying to get in contact with him via Simon, and maybe it’ll happen someday. It’s just fantastic, but also kind of ungraspable in a way.”

The band members came from different musical places when they met at university, but there were some touchstones.

“Radiohead, and then sort of Beach House and the Flaming Lips,” the vocalist says. “A lot of them were also on the Bella Union roster, so we’re also looking at them and therefore also contacting them a lot.”

Asked how Lowly’s sound has changed over the course of about a decade since its inception, she surmises, “I think we started out in like a Tame Impala dream wave, Cocteau Twins type of sound, really like the sort of reverb sound, and maybe we’ve sort of gone to a more clear, dry place, more to-the-bone-type of production also.”

Scheduled concerts, for now, are limited to a run of dates in their native Denmark in January.

“I think it’s always incredible just to play in the US. We played KEXP,” Viemose says, remembering a session at the influential Seattle indie radio station. “That was amazing and also really extremely nerve wracking. My mouth was so dry. Going on tour in the US, we got our visas approved the day before we had to leave, and I was in the embassy to pick them up, but that was really incredible.

“Also going to festivals in the UK where you sort live as a band and get to talk to your friends every day. It’s really nice to be on tour. And then of course we played in Denmark, some really big venues.

“It is also incredible to actually meet or see that you have listeners. You sort of forget that sometimes when we have these periods of downtime where we either make a record or are about to release a record, and that is quite a long sort of free period. In that time, you’re sort of uncertain if the audience is still there, so that when you go on tour, it’s really fantastic to see that people are listening and still caring about your music.”

Following up on the album’s first single “Pretending to Be People,” the new song shows the group’s knack for blending aspects of dream pop, shoegaze and various other genres under the unique Crystal Eyes banner.

On the jangly track, frontwoman Erin Jenkins sings over hazy melodies of having lived a lie and refusing to continue it. The group says, “To be a ghostwriter is to be invisible. It’s easier to pretend to be someone else — to live inside someone else’s skin. There’s a certain comfort in a pseudonym, but to be a whole, free, flying human, you have to break away from it.”

Jenkins tells Highway 81 Revisited: “I wanted the ending vocal section to have a choir-like quality to it. I grew up singing in choirs and really love how they sound. I typically spend at least 12 hours (sometimes more) recording backup vocals for our records; I consider them to be as important as the lead vocal in achieving the sound. It’s a very cathartic section of the song, it swells into this kind of beautiful feeling of release. Get it out so you can let it go.”

Crystal Eyes’ “Ghostwriter” makes its exclusive debut at Highway 81 Revisited today:

“Secret Oscillator” was produced by Andrew Woods and mixed by Mark Lawson, who was part of the team that won a Grammy for Album of the Year in 2011 for Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs.”

Last month, Crystal Eyes released a music video for “Pretending to be People,” directed by Your Wild Friend (Ava Wild), which features a nod to Radiohead’s “Karma Police” video.

Founded in Athens in 1990, the band “have a visceral and uncompromising sound that looks as much to the cavernous halls of doom metal for inspiration as it does the icy vistas of black and death metal,” in the words of the always reliable AllMusic.  

The group’s neoclassical proclivities have brought them to monumental stages like the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens two years ago and Ancient Theater in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, just last month. For such epic performances, Septicflesh has been joined by a choir and orchestra.

As the band continues its work on a new LP, its first full-length since 2022’s “Modern Primitive,” the North American dates are an opportunity for founding members Spiros “Seth Siro Anton” Antoniou (bass, “harsh vocals”) and Christos Antoniou (lead guitar, orchestrations) as well as musicians including drummer Kerim “Krimh” Lechner to continue to spread their brand of metal on a global scale.

In advance of Septicflesh’s support set for Arch Enemy and The Black Dahlia Murder at Palladium Times Square on Saturday, Oct. 24, we caught up with Lerchner, who hails from Austria, to chat all things Septicflesh.

What does it feel like to be on stage with 100 musicians and a choir and have that power around you as the drummer who is driving the whole thing?

First of all, an orchestra is not as loud as you expect, so there’s always a little bit of war going on on stage, like I’m being too loud compared to them. I always feel a little bit bad because I kind of want to keep the same intensity when I play, so usually during rehearsals, I try to play as quiet as I can, but on a live show I play as usual.

The responsibility is quite, quite high. So the conductor and myself, we are kind of the main guys that are leading the ship. Obviously, the conductor is the guy that gives the OK to start the song, but what I experienced is that an orchestra has a hard time playing to a click track or to some, let’s say, consistent tempo, so that’s something that the orchestra usually needs to really get used to, that there’s someone in the back that gives them a constant time. But I felt like those moments when you let them loose, they kind of start to really shift around as they usually do, but when I start to play with them, it glues it together. So it feels nice that there’s all of a sudden a unity within the orchestra.

It’s great to see how many musicians who have never heard drums being played like this so often. They will turn around during rehearsals or they will pull out their phones and record, or they come afterwards to me, like, “You’re a really good drummer. I didn’t know you can play so fast with your feet,” and to feel that appreciation from someone who has spent all their life perfecting their craft. But classical musicians are a very different kind of breed of musicians, because I’m coming from this kind of passion where I play everything by ear, I play everything without sheet music. I play sometimes longer than I have to or I’m willing to sacrifice a lot. And with classical musicians, they need sheet music and then they are having specific times where they will play and where they will not play. So it’s almost like a job. And for me, that way of approaching music was a bit strange to see them come exactly at 9:00 and they leave exactly at 1 and that’s it.

How are you scaling down that type of presentation for the smaller stages and shorter set times of the North American tour?

Such things like the Acropolis show with an orchestra is an absolute unique thing for the band and definitely stands out of the norm, so our usual headline set with just the band is definitely less demanding. We are going to have a much shorter set time, and this is where the big challenge lays in that we have to find a set list where you kind of have the hits in it. But the problem is the band has been around for a long time, so there are many hit songs. We’re gonna focus mainly on hits and try to actually gain new fans, because this tour, even though we have less playing time, it will be still for us a great opportunity to play in bigger venues in North America than we usually do. The package is great. I’m a big fan of of Arch Enemy and [drummer] Daniel Erlandsson. He has been one of my big influences for many years. So we hope to get new fans. It’s always great to mix up the lineup and be on the road with bands we usually are not associated with.

Where are you at in the process of making the new album?

We have been working a lot of months already. Usually, we take too long to release a new album, but we want to make a good album. It’s five people involved. It’s going pretty well. Like we are in the high season, let’s put it this way, we are more or less towards the end of finalizing which songs we want to do. That doesn’t mean that the songs are ready yet. There’s still a lot of work, but you’re just collecting ideas and then we have to decide, this is a potential song that can go on the album. What I can say so far is that the material itself is on the faster pace, so it’s going to be a more intense album compared to our previous releases. We are in the process of finalizing the song structure, and then we move on to work on lyrics, vocal placement. I have to do still some drum arrangements. So it’s still a lot of work ahead, but it’s going well.

Your guitarist Christos Antoniou also works as a composer and earned degrees at the London College of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music, also in the UK. Is working with someone with that type of training and approach different than working with other types of bandmates?

He is a very different character in terms of how he approaches the music, because we are all songwriters. Christos is usually the guy that brings mainly an orchestration or an orchestral piece that he had in mind, so he always kind of thinks from the orchestra side first and he’s giving you the orchestra that has a lot of layers, and then you try to add the metal part on top of it. What that means for me as a drummer, he sometimes gives me certain cues where he says, “listen to the orchestra, what the flutes are doing or the percussion. Can you kind of follow that rhythmical pattern?” Otherwise, he’s very open. He’s not as like with classical musicians, you need scores, so everybody plays with scores. But he never told me I need to play exactly this kind of thing. I’m lucky. I don’t need to be that exact. I can play what I feel like. But his processing of the music always comes first from the orchestra rather than the metal part.

I’ve been enjoying the band’s “Amphibians” EP from 2025. How did those songs come together?

Actually, what most people don’t know is that we recorded those songs specifically during the same time we recorded “Modern Primitive,” so it was that we recorded with [producer] Jens Bogren back then and we recorded more songs than we actually put on our initial album, because we were thinking maybe to release it later on. But obviously because of the whole pandemic situation, it was more complicated and things got delayed and postponed constantly. Then we decided to release it later on the EP. So it is kind of new songs because people don’t know about them, but for us it feels like we have been playing those songs many, many years ago already.

The final chapter had been written.

But when original guitarist Pete Klett filled in on some 2025 dates, Martin was inspired to write a sequel.  

“Pete coming back to the band re-sparked my love for music,” Martin says in a phone interview. “We hadn’t played together or written together since 2010, then he left the band in 2015. I made three other records without him and I was kind of at my wit’s end musically. I didn’t feel like I’m where I want to be as an artist, as a creative, and I was pretty burned out from touring, and he came back and played some shows with us.”

Klett wanted to do more than fill in while then-guitarist Brian Quinn had to miss time for a wedding. “Pete was like, ‘Look, man, I’m really missing playing with you guys. Is there any chance you can kind of forgo this retirement for a bit?’”Martin recalls. “I was like, ‘Well, you know, let’s see what happens.’ And we started working and we jammed some dates last year, and I’m like, yeah, we can forgo that. Let’s make some moves. So that’s kind of really what happened.”

Martin, Klett and company have released a new song called “I Remember Everything” and are headlining an ambitious tour called “I Can’t Quit You,” with a stable of openers for various shows, including fellow ‘90s upstarts Sponge, The Verve Pipe and Sweet Water, young country rock band American Blonde and the literary-minded indie folk group Mountain Goats. Mountain Goats are an unlikely pairing, but a connection was forged when MGs released a song in July that references a fictitious tour with Candlebox.

Emerging from Seattle, at the time the center of the alternative rock universe, Candlebox was the first rock band signed to Maverick Records, the label run by Madonna. The self-titled first album spawned the hits “Far Behind” and “You,” and the group found itself on massive tours opening for Rush and Metallica. A second album, “Lucy,” represented a musical progression but a commercial retreat, a gold album that paled in comparison to the quadruple-platinum of the debut. More albums would come, but “Lucy” would be the last time Candlebox would reach gold status (500,000 units sold).

Ahead of the band’s shows with Sponge at Penn’s Peak in Jim Thorpe, PA, on Sunday and the Bowery Ballroom on Monday, Martin chatted about his “chemical and mathematical” partnership with Klett, the wild times of the band’s commercial peak, what he and his comrades learned from the members of Rush and why the music created by his generation is resonating with younger people, including his own son.

Music fans are familiar with the classic singer-guitarist dynamic, the Mick and Keith, push and pull, love-hate thing. What is your relationship with Pete like?

It’s push and pull. We’re the best of friends. We’ve known one another since we were 22. I didn’t know him before the band. We’ve been musician friends for 35 years. He’s an incredible talent, but he also needs me musically, and I need him musically, and I think that’s what we realize every time we get together writing, that it’s the kind of mathematical element that works in Candlebox that didn’t really work in our other projects. There’s something chemical and mathematical about our relationship and I’m just happy that it’s continuing on.

Does it feel different to be working together than it did in your 20s and 30s?

We are older. We’re a lot more mature and we understand one another a lot more. We understand ourselves a lot more. We understand what our musical abilities are. All of that stuff comes from growing up. But there’s also that moment where it’s exactly the same, where we connect on something instantly and it falls right into place.

Candlebox was the first rock band to sign to Maverick. They released your first album in 1993, and two years later they put out Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill.” What was it like being thrust into that world?

I think we were all hanging on for dear life at one point. We’re out on tour with Metallica. We’ve got the number seven record in the country and we’re moving 150,000 units a week, and everybody’s looking at us like, “Who are these knuckleheads from Seattle and why are they on Maverick Records?” We were asked to do press for Woodstock in ’94, and no one in the press corps gave a shit because we were the band that nobody cared about. So I think we were all hanging on for dear life. What does this mean? Where are we headed? What is this career going to be for us if nobody in this mixed media world of television and film and writing and journalists and online or whatever it is, what does this all mean? And where do we go from here? We were just out of balance as human beings, and it was freaky. And then you get your first royalty check and you’re like, oh, let’s buy a Porsche. What?

Did you think it was strange when Candlebox was asked to tour with Rush on their Counterparts tour, and how did it work out?

I didn’t think it was strange because I always thought Candlebox was an arena rock band. I thought we wrote songs like “The Spirit of Radio.” I always felt that was kind of what we were like, we were a Journey or we were a Foreigner, you know? We wrote melodic rock songs and ballads. So I thought it was a perfect combination. And it ended up that it was because they had us out with them from January till April of ’94, and I think it established us as a band to maybe be reckoned with. And it’s also why we got the Metallica tour. We did stand there on stage and see nothing but middle fingers for the first, you know, 30 rows of the concert. Nobody really wanted to see Candlebox open for Rush. I think all the fans that were in the stands or in the way-back were fans of Candlebox who were buying tickets to see us at that show, and I think the guys in Rush realized that and they took great care of us and taught us a lot about how to treat other musicians and how to treat your career and respecting your art form and those types of things. I’m very grateful to Alex, Neil and Geddy for that because it really showed me what it means to be a touring artist and a touring musician and how to be human.

How did you find out about the song “Candlebox” by Mountain Goats? How did you react?

My manager sent it to me. And I was like, “I love Mountain Goats. Why? What is this song?” And she said, “Well, did they ever tour with you?” I said, “no,” I go, “This is just a super interesting thing for me. I’ve gotta reach out to them.” And so she contacted their manager and got me John Darnielle’s number and I texted him. I was like, “Hey, man, this is cool. I don’t know if you’d be interested, but we’d love to have you actually open some dates.” And he was like, “Yeah, right, this is the singer for Candlebox,” that whole thing, which I get a lot when I meet people. I’m a pretty basic dude and I wash my cars and I build shit around my house and I like meeting people.

So it was an interesting way that it fell into our laps, and he was like, “Well, this is really you. Yeah, we’d love to do those dates.” So they’re doing two shows with us and we’re very excited about that. I’ve loved that band for years. They’ve been one of my favorite artists. My music taste is incredibly eclectic and they’ve been in there for about 40 years or maybe 35 years, about the same time as Candlebox.

But it’s a very interesting mix of opening artists and we’re happy to have Sponge back. It’s gonna be cool.

Sponge was your tour opener in 1996 and you’re bringing them back out 30 years later. Had you stayed in touch with them over the years?

I’ve kept in touch with Vinnie [Dombroski] since that first tour, and we’ve done shows with him over the past 30 years. I’ve loved that band since their debut album. It’s really been a full-circle career for both bands, I think, Candlebox and Sponge, and it seems like a no-brainer. We actually asked Seven Mary Three to do some dates with us as well, but they’re in the studio making a record. Maybe next year we can do something with those guys.

There has been a resurgent interest in ‘90s culture, including music. Do you feel that’s a tide that’s helping lift bands like yourselves?

Oh, absolutely. That kind of sincerity and honesty of the ‘90s rock music is something that everybody’s looking for right now. There’s a real interest in that from a very young generation right now. My son, he’s 18, he’s headed to New York for school, and he listens to a lot of ‘90s rock and roll, but he’s also listening to Steely Dan and Christopher Cross and Foreigner and REO Speedwagon. So these kids are finding that the music of the past is a lot more sincere than the music of the present, and it’s because it’s not about me, it’s about us, it’s about them, it’s about the world. I think that that sincerity of ‘90s rock and roll is something that everyone’s gravitating towards right now. I think that if you had a movement like that right now, I think there’d be a great change in the world. I don’t think that’s going to happen, sadly.

So are you fully unretired or do you just have one toe dipped back in?

Half a foot in the water.

That’s pretty good.

I was done and then Pete came back and I was like, oh, this is fun. Let’s see how much longer we can go. I told him, until my voice gives out, you’ve got me. And I’m a bit of a vocal acrobat on stage, so I don’t know how much longer that’s going to be. It might be you got me for another three years, maybe for another five, I don’t know.

Photo by Carlos Novais

Indeed, a stated mission of Angels On The Battlefield, who released their latest single “A Dance With Angels” today, “is to empower listeners through music, to assist individuals who are fighting on their own battlefields and to help them find courage,” and “to improve awareness of and discourse around mental illness through the power of heavy metal.”

The new song will be featured on the group’s debut album “A New Beginning,” which comes out in January and follows a debut EP released in 2018.

Guitarist JD McGibney, formerly of Voodoo Kungfu, a metal band formed in Beijing that relocated to LA, launched Angels On The Battlefield as a side project before solidifying a full band line-up in 2021. The current roster is bassist Jason Klein, formerly of Butcher Babies, drummer Eddie Trager, formerly of Nekrogoblikon, and keyboard player Chris Wirsig, whose work includes composing for TV, film and video games.

As McGibney and company were creating the new album, topical themes emerged, he explains.

“Most of the songs on the record came to be composed over the span of a little over a decade,” McGibney says in a video interview. “Once everything was kind of finished and fleshed out, I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of common themes going on here.’ After the writing period was done, I kind of realized, ‘This is what these songs are conveying to me,’ and they kind of built the theme themselves, I feel.”

Listeners might wonder how concepts usually presented via lyrics announce themselves to the writer of an instrumental song.

“That is a really good question,” says McGibney. “Each of the songs in my head has a narrative that goes along with it. Every song that you hear, there’s a story that goes along with it, so through that narrative is where I’m driving the themes of everything. A lot of it is obviously emotionally driven in the compositions, or we have a few songs that were inspired by books, or like ‘Modern Prometheus,’ which is not on the album, is inspired by Frankenstein, but still, there’s an emotional context to the composition that I related to.”

One of the songs on the upcoming album, “Beauty In A Body Bag,” tackles Borderline Personality Disorder.

“I’ve actually had two people in my life previously who have Borderline Personality Disorder,” the guitarist and composer says. “One person is clinically diagnosed with it, and the other person has not been clinically diagnosed but shows all nine signs of BPD. It’s affected my life as an outsider, as a loved one, looking in and just seeing the hardships that people that suffer from BPD go through on a daily basis. And for me, one of the most heartbreaking things is seeing somebody go through that and deal with that level of darkness and not being able to actually do anything for them.

“But there are treatments for BPD. You very much need to see a mental health professional in order to properly get that treatment, but it is 100% treatable. I just want to bring awareness to it because I personally have seen people suffer from it, and it’s utterly heartbreaking.”

Heavy metal musicians have traditionally portrayed themselves as larger-than-life “tough guys,” with some even cosplaying as Vikings or demons. The vulnerability required to open up a discission about mental health goes against that perception. However, McGibney says he hasn’t experienced any reticence from the metal community. In fact, he has found it to be an inclusive space since his youth.

“Everyone in the band is 100% on board with the message and the mission of the band in general, which makes doing this just feel so much more comfortable knowing that I have a team around me that believes in the same thing. Because it’s hard to make art with that kind of purpose without having anyone wanting to do the same thing, especially because it touches on such a sensitive topic. But the overall feedback and reaction has been wonderful, and I personally feel that the metal community in general is a lot more open to mental health in general. A band like Bring Me The Horizon, lyrically and thematically, Oli Sykes is very open with his struggles and the things that he goes through.

“I also think especially with a lot of legacy acts, like a band like Metallica, I think when a band opens up with a song like ‘Nothing Else Matters,’ when that song came out, it was a shock, because James Hetfield just kind of poured his heart out, wore his heart on his sleeve.

“I personally have experienced almost nothing but love for openly talking about mental health, and I want to give credit to the metal community for just being so open to one another, because one of the things that drew me to the community when I was a kid was the fact that it was so inclusive. When I was growing up, I was an awkward kid. I felt like I didn’t really fit in anywhere, but going to metal concerts or hanging out with other metalheads, there was this idea of acceptance of like, oh, you could just be you, you don’t have to put on any pretense. It’s just you are who you are. Just come on in.”

McGibney hosts a podcast called “Conquer Your Battlefield,” where he and a guest discuss life’s struggles and metaphorical battlefields. Past guests include Atreyu’s Travis Miguel and Dr. Jerald Kreisman, a leading international expert on BPD. Future guests include Vicky Psarakis from Sicksense and Matt Cerami of Lapetus.

“This is an idea that has stirred for a while, to do an all-vocal collaborative album,” LaValle says during a video interview from his studio in Los Angeles. “This was a collection of songs that I kind of felt had room for a vocalist, and then also with that thought, I really wanted the vocalist to be able to really navigate their own journey within their performance. What I mean by that is, I think a lot of my songs don’t have obvious changes, if that makes sense. Like I might do subtle things like change a bass note on this turn around or something like that, and that to me is enough of a change or a vibe switch, so I wanted these vocalists to create their own choruses, create their own ‘-ness.'”

Raphaelle Standell-Preston, who fronts the groups Braids Blue Hawaii, was an impetus for the LP, he says.

“Raphaelle’s work with Blue Hawaii was really a huge inspo for me because of the way that she performs and the way that she’s able to really create a journey, and I think she does that really well in this song, ‘Take Me,’ the one that we did together,” says LaValle. “I think that that was kind of a benchmark or maybe a goalpost of what I was kind of expecting. And I’d always been really inspired by her delivery in particular. So my first thought was kind of inspired by her and the way that she can really take you places in one performance.”

LaValle, then based in San Diego, emerged as The Album Leaf in 1999 with the album “An Orchestrated Rise to Fall” and released records on important labels like Sub Pop, while composing for Netflix features, film festival standouts such as “Things Will Be Different” (SXSW 2024) and “Touch Me” (Sundance 2025), as well as for the Calm app.

“A Body Of Voices” was released at the beginning of October. The Album Leaf will perform as part of the Numero Group label’s 23rd anniversary celebration at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on Nov. 14, where LaValle’s band, as well as Laraaji and Shira Small, will perform an album in full. The Album Leaf will play its 2001 second record, “One Day I’ll Be On Time.”

LaValle chatted with me about how he made “A Body Of Voices” in a different manner than his previous albums, what synthesizers and pedals he used, why the Fender Rhodes electric piano remains his “ride or die” and how he used AI to plan his setlist for a festival gig.

Did you also have certain lyrics or lyrical themes in mind when you were imagining vocals on these songs?

So I had this collection of songs and I basically had it posted on like a playlist, and as we reached out to collaborators, they just picked their songs. So they got all instrumentals with a lot of the melodics already kind of in place, and then I guess the correct term is they top lined with their own delivery, and then I then responded to their vocal takes on my own. So basically they would deliver their vocal and then I would further produce their vocal and further kind of produce the song, kind of finding what [additional] melodics I could add or support their melodies, stuff like that.

Is this process different from how you usually make Album Leaf records?

Yeah, definitely. Lyrics and theme have never really been a focus of mine. It’s not to say that I don’t care about them. I don’t have thoughts about it, but that’s really kind of where I lean on the collaboration. I want the collaborator to bring what they’re going to bring and kind of give them free rein. So that’s kind of an unusual approach. I did a record with Mark Kozelek [Sun Kill Moon] many, many years ago, almost 13 years ago, and there was a similar kind of approach there where I didn’t produce his vocals further, he was more particular about how he wanted his vocal to sound, and it was more of a collaborative record from front to back. But I did send him songs and then when he would deliver his vocal, I would mix it in and then I would add more kind of structurally and just respond to it. So I feel like I think that’s the beauty of collaboration is the back and forth and the responding to something that’s been delivered.

Stepping away from the words and focusing on the sounds, was there a specific sonic world you were building?

Not really. I do feel like as someone who’s released records for almost or for 30 years, I kind of evolve and get into my own kind of sonic loops or, you know, this is my favorite synth at the moment. So a lot of it’s based around that, or like, I just learned this production technique. I got really into a specific effect on the vocals that I was using kind of over and over again on this Eventide H9 pedal. I ran a lot of outboard effects. I use a lot of stomp boxes and things like that and in ways that are conventional to me but maybe not with what you know. I think pedals are made to do whatever they want, but often you think pedals and it’s like a guitar pedal. I’m obviously a synth guy. So I run all my stuff, all my synths, and from my Ableton rig I can send audio through the pedals at any point and print it and fuck with it and manipulate, and that’s kind of part of my process. So I was really into that sonically, and I think that that kind of goes throughout the entirety of the record.

What were your primary synths for this album?

I use a Novation Peak and Summit, which are essentially the same synths. The Peak is kind of the desktop version without a keyboard and the Summit is two Peaks in one and you can split keys and split voicings and it’s an actual 61-key synth. That Moog d fam I use a lot for beats. I use Make Noise kind of in a melodic way. Gosh, what else? I mean, there’s all kinds of stuff all over it. I think a lot of my pedals are kind of key, like the Eventide H9 was really key for it. Gosh, trying to now rack my brain because the gear side is my pride and joy. I do a lot of sample manipulation within Ableton as well, so I do a lot of sampling and reprocessing and audio manipulation to kind of create new synths and then create new sounds out of samples, and things that I’ve sampled making them melodic.

As technology has developed since you started making music, do you think it’s changed the way you compose?

Absolutely. I was a little late to this [interview] because I just got lost in this new piece of gear that I got. It’s this little four-channel or four-voice granular sampler and I’m just figuring out how to kind of load things in it and perform it, and it’s just really fun. There’s so many tools available. Also, the way I perform has changed immensely utilizing Ableton as opposed to the way that I did 20 years ago or whatever. Obviously the Rhodes has been there the entire way through, You know, my ride or die. But I mean the synthesizers that I use have changed, but essentially the need-to, go-to synths have always been there.

But you know, production techniques, obviously, ‘ve gotten better as I’ve made records for 30 years now. And, and yeah, again though, I mean, I kind of just still keep falling into my own little production ruts of like, oh, this is what I’m doing and I gotta do this. And, you know, so I’m kind of Excited for the next chapter of whatever is going to is going to come.

Why is the Fender Rhodes a special instrument for you?

I think from the very first time I played it, I just fell in love with it. I was actually playing drums for a band called go, go, Go Earhart, and after the Rhodes was set up in the living room that we practiced in and after our practices — that band they would live record all practices and that would essentially turn into their records, which was really a cool thing, kind of edit the jams together. After those practices, I was like well, what is that thing? and then just play it. And then it kind of turned into like, oh, can you teach me how to play this thing? I was just like, God, this thing is, I don’t know, just the way that they’re very human in a way that they’re all unique. II toured with it through the States and then I would go to Europe and I’d have to rent one, and the way that it would respond would not be the same, and the way that it played wasn’t the same. The sound that I could get out of it wasn’t the same. I have a very particular Rhodes chain and sound that I use, and I could never recreate that.

Have you been able to harness AI?

I haven’t done it in regards to Album Leaf records. I have been able to utilize it more in the film space with composing with scoring. But I had a show at the post Festival in Indianapolis, and it was like only an hour or 90 or 75 minutes or something like that, and I chose a batch of songs, and then I put those song titles and BPMs into ChatGPT and said “make this into a set list,” like creating a vibe and an arc and an intro, and they’re like, “oh, this,” and then they totally gave me three different options of set lists. They mostly were kind of in my order already, but a couple things changed here and there, and I was like, “oh, that’s cool.” I’ve utilized it in those kinds of ways for music. But there’s a company called Output that you can kind of put in prompts that you’re looking for and they’ll create like sample banks for you. I’ve done it in the way of like, I’m scoring a film that’s about this and it’s set in this time period and it’s set like this. What do you think would be cool for instrumentation? And it’ll respond and give me some ideas. Yeah, things like that.

The New York drummer’s funk rock band in the 1990s, the Authority, were on the cusp of a breakthrough, having secured the management services of Bill Graham and playing more than 200 shows a year, sharing stages with Phish, Blues Traveler and Dave Matthews Band. But Graham died, a potential deal with Ice Cube fell apart and the Authority broke up.  

Now in Boulder, Sachs built a business and a life outside of music, but in 2022 he reconnected with the multi-instrumentalist who calls himself Tonin and they formed Mynd Reader. Shelby Kemp would join on vocals and Zach Jackson would take the bass role.

Mynd Reader’s “Soundtrack of Life” makes its exclusive debut at Highway 81 Revisited today:

“‘Soundtrack of Life’ is about the songs that define the memories of our lives,” Sachs tells Highway 81. “The songs that have become our friends that are always there for us, and remain telling our story after we’re gone.  Maybe the ‘Soundtrack of Our Life’ is the part of us that is immortal. … “

The song is featured on the band’s new EP, “Sunday Drive,” out on Friday, Oct. 16, a follow-up to their self-titled debut, which was released in July. Michael Brauer, the Grammy-winning engineer who worked on recordings for the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Coldplay and My Morning Jacket, mixed the Mynd Reader debut record. For “Sunday Drive,” Sachs enlisted him to both mix and produce, something he hadn’t done in years.

A new full-length is planned for next summer.

That heroic quest is memorialized on Daniel Donato and Cosmic Country’s new live album “Ryman to Robert’s,” on which Donato and crew perform at the storied Ryman Auditorium in Nashville before decamping down the block for a set at Robert’s Western World, the small venue where he got his big break.

In addition to leading his own group, the musician who blends Americana, psychedelic rock and jam band flavors has performed as a member of Billy and The Kids, the band led by Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, and has also played with Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, the Dead members who recently passed.

Ahead of his show with Cosmic Country at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester on Saturday, Donato went deep with Highway 81 Revisited on the new live record, the advice his mom gave him before he played with Bob Weir and why Americans love their country even in the worst of times, even if they might not realize it.

Why did you decide to make “From Ryman To Robert’s?”

Nashville is full of so many fantastic, talented entertainers, but there’s never been an entertainer that started out on the street, grew to the honky-tonks, grew to the Ryman, and then on the first night of playing the Ryman went back to the stage where they cut their teeth and memorialized it, recorded it, captured it, framed it in a picture, so to speak, and to share it with the world. It’s never been done. When I played downtown, I remember playing down there and seeing Sierra Ferrell down there, Ashley McBryde down there, I remember seeing Sturgill Simpson play at Robert’s, and I saw a lot of fantastic artists cut their teeth down there, but they never put out a record that actually memorialized that story, that hero’s journey in that Joseph Campbell sense, so to speak. So it is full circle.

Do you have any special memories of playing at the Capitol?

Oh, tons. Playing with Phil Lesh for his 80th birthday or was that his 84th birthday? That was really special. Getting to share the stage with Grahame [Lesh] and Mike Gordon and John Molo and all those fantastic musicians and Cosmic Country. Our first time Cosmic Country played there, we opened up for Leftover Salmon. We did a co-headline show with them, so to speak, and that was brilliant. And there’s also some other fun memories of hanging out with Peter Shapiro there until three in the morning.

Your mom is a Deadhead, right?

Yeah. More or less, -ish, yeah. She was a fan of the Grateful Dead’s music, that’s for sure.

Did she get to see you play with Bobby, Phil or Billy?

She did, she did online.

What was that like for her?

You know, that’s the funny thing. I guess it’s funny, it’s also very strange, a mother’s love. My mom’s very proud of me for all of that, but she was just as proud of me to play with the Don Kelley Band for the first time down at Roberts. That was a revelation of my life and still is. So I think the trophies that I deem the hierarchy of attainments are not analogous with my mom’s. When I played Red Rocks, my mom texted me to make sure that I was wearing a jacket. I have a Jewish mom, an Italian dad. So, you know, classic New Jersey combination there. She’s actually more proud that I’m warm on stage than if it’s Bob Weir I’m playing with.

“You’re going to catch a cold.”

Yeah, “you’re gonna catch a cold.” You know, when we played the Beacon, my mom sent half a pound of whitefish and nova lox with everything bagels to the venue.

Every few years we hear that Americana music is making a comeback, or having a moment, not that it’s ever fully gone way. But right now it seems like there is a groundswell of younger musicians playing what is loosely called Americana and doing quite well. Do you think there is a moment happening?

Yeah, I do. I think it is very easy to confuse the sacred and the profane as it pertains to America, and I view the sacred as primary, but the devil gets his due. The profane is secondary. I say this with no judgment, but I think it’s very easy to put the profane over the sacred, so the concept of what America is in a profane sense manifests politically usually, but the concept of what America was, is, and will be manifests in the sacred, usually as it pertains to the individuals that live within a free country and what they build and create. … So I think the sacredness of America is very easy to be found as it pertains to American music and American art, whether that be film through Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino, whether that be writing through John Steinbeck and Kerouac or whether that be through music, whether that be Elizabeth Cotten, Jimmie Rodgers, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, all the way to Molly Tuttle, Sierra Ferrell, Billy Strings, Charley Crockett, all those people. And so I think that the people of America love American music but we don’t love the profanity of the manmade machine. That is the politics. But we love the man-discovered divinity. That is music. I think what’s happening is people love America and they just don’t know it. They also think that America could grow and be better, which it can. But I think the mistake that a lot of people are making is they’re more or less throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The thing about it that disappoints me, or that my opinion is, well, yeah, if you focus on the thing that’s manmade the most, then you’re going to get what Caesar is. And you shouldn’t lay your treasures where Caesar is. You should lay your treasures where he’s not. And that’s where music comes from, and specifically American music. So I find it very easy to be in service to the commonwealth of our country, because I put the sacred in a primary sense. So I think it’s easy to love America when you look at what’s sacred about it and not profane.

You are referencing Joseph Campbell, Cesar and some pretty deep historical and philosophical topics. Where does this come from? Are you a big reader?

Yeah, it comes from books, comes from books, and also that very strange thing that happens after you read books, which is ideas come into your mind and no one knows where those ideas come from. People say that I thought that up, but you didn’t. If you thought about something after you asked the question, then why’d you ever ask the question in the first place? So where are these thoughts coming from? We don’t know. No one knows. And that’s a very strange part of our mind. And I love reading because that is a way to almost do like a bench lift for your mind every day. Just as one breaks down muscle tissue and it grows back bigger, the same thing happens, I believe, neurologically and psychologically when you read. So I love reading about mythology, theology, fiction, because there’s really no difference between a good fictitious story and real life. Pretty much the same thing. I know that’s a naive framework that we’re taught when we’re young, that fiction is fake. It’s not fake at all. If it was fake, people would call it AI slop, but it’s actually quite the opposite. People pay tons of money to go see movies and people invest hundreds of millions of dollars to produce stories that are fiction. They’re not. So I just love reading. I try to read every day and then practice my scales after.

Daniel Donato and Cosmic Country will perform at The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester on Saturday, Oct. 17. Tickets and info here.

Photo by Jason Stoltzfus