Somewhere Further West: My Second Demo Album Is Live, Loud, and Free

I have a treat for you this summer, especially if you are going to be in the car on a long drive with the windows down.

Yesterday I dropped my second album, Somewhere Further West. I actually wrote these lyrics about six months ago and then sat on them, on purpose, waiting to see how far my skills and the technology would come before I produced it. I am really glad I waited, because this one came out bigger, louder and way more fun.

Where the first album, Somewhere West of Me, was heartfelt folk-country, this one is heartland rock, country and hybrid Nashville hip-hop. And here is the concept I really ran with: it is produced as a live album. A concert, start to finish, crowd and all. The idea is that our man Dixon, the character from the novel The Sit Boy, has been discovered and is now a full-blown rock star touring the country. The whole arc is in there: getting found (a bar in Tucson on a Tuesday night, some kid’s phone, and by Friday the whole world is staring back at him), learning to live on the road, and figuring out that the guy who used to sing about the desert alone is the same guy, he “just plays a louder guitar” now.

It opens with “Whiskey in My Coffee,” rolls through the touring life in “Every Town USA” and “Worth the Wreck,” and builds to the title track, “Further West.”

And he is not out there alone. There is a woman with him, someone you have not met in the book yet, and she takes the microphone for two of my favorite songs on the record, big, funny, completely unapologetic modern country. One of them has a line I still laugh at every time: “God didn’t make these legs to waste ‘em on a careful man.” The the main set peaks with the two of them singing a pretty epic duet together.

Then the lights come back up for an encore, live and reworked versions of a few songs from the earlier catalog, including “Gone by Morning,” the song Dixon writes out on the road in the novel itself and a beautiful new version of “No Thanks to You” which was the first song written for Somewhere West of Me.

One note on how this is made, because I have been transparent about my process in everything else. I use the latest generation of AI tools to produce the music and the vocals on these songs, and the tool I use is built on licensed voices from real singers. I am proud of how it came out and proud of how it was made.

It is free to listen to right now on the site.

Listen to Somewhere Further West →

Now go find a good stretch of highway. Turn the volume up, y’all.