The next recording from Chris Jones & the Night Drivers, Lonely Comes Easy, has been scheduled for an August 27 release on Rebel.
It’s the third project from this edition of the band. Ned Luberecki is on banjo, Jon Weisberger on bass, and Mark Stoffel on mandolin. Jones handles guitar and lead vocals, and all the guys assist with vocal harmony.
We asked Weisberger to share a quick preview…
“We recorded again at our favorite studio, Ben Surratt’s Rec Room, and brought in just a couple of guests for a number or two apiece: singers Emily Bankester, Sierra Hull and Claire Lynch, along with Jeremy Garrett (fiddle), Buddy Greene (harmonica)and Ivan Rosenberg on dobro.
As with all of Chris’s past projects, Lonely Comes Easy highlights original songs—only this time, all of the members of the band contributed, with the four of us and a couple of co-writers accounting for nine out of the 13 tracks. Chris and I collaborated on three, including the previously-released single, If That Was Love, and one written with Chris Stuart.
Chris contributed a couple of others by himself, including the title track, and wrote Where I Am with Tom T. and Dixie Hall, while I co-wrote Barn Burner with Lisa Shaffer. And while the trend in contemporary bluegrass has been away from including multiple instrumentals, this album features not one, but two—one each from Ned and Mark.
Other songs come from Doc Watson (Wake Up, Little Maggie), Jack Clement by way of Charley Pride (Too Hard To Say I’m Sorry), C. W. McCall (Wolf Creek Pass) and the Stanley Brothers (A Few More Years, reissued from 2000’s Just A Drifter).
The album is the first full-length release of new material in four years, and I think we all feel it’s a good representation of where the Night Drivers are these days. We’ve had the same guys in the band for five years now; we’re writing a lot (with two award-winning songwriters in the band, that’s no surprise); we have some great friends and co-writers; and we’ve got as broad a range of material as we’ve had since Ned and I joined the Night Drivers – and that’s been ten years now.
Responses to the first ‘digital single’ from the album – If That Was Love and Wolf Creek Pass – have been great, with the latter reaching #1 and the former #2 on Bluegrass Today’s weekly airplay chart, so we’re excited to serve up a whole new collection to go along with them.
Kyle Cantrell’s going to be previewing our title track and next single, Lonely Comes Easy, together with One Who’s Coming After Me and Wake Up, Little Maggie, on SiriusXM’s Bluegrass Junction on the morning of July 10, and Rebel will be releasing the song to radio the following week. More to come after that!”
There should be audio samples available by the time the single is released next week.
