TREASURE OF LOVE
FIRST ALBUM IN 12 YEARS
RELEASED JULY 9TH
VIA RACK'EM RECORDS & THIRTY TIGERS
Today, The Flatlanders, the iconic Texas-based trio of Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore announced their first album of newly recorded music in more than 12 years. Treasure of Love will be released on July 9 via Rack'em Records/Thirty Tigers. The band released the album’s first single “Sittin’ On Top of the World,” which is well known by fans of The Flatlanders to be one of their most notable show closers. Treasure of Love is now available for pre-order.
"Sometimes you're sitting on top of the world, the next minute you are face down on the bottom. Just like life. (And the very next minute you are at the top again),” said Butch Hancock about the song. "Because better to sit on top of it. Rather than carry it. It’s a song that once you have it in your head you have to sing it,” added Joe Ely.
Photo by JAY BLAKESBERG
Completed during COVID-19 lockdowns with the help of longtime friend and collaborator Lloyd Maines, Treasure of Love finds The Flatlanders in classic form, serving up a rollicking collection of twang-fueled, harmony-laden performances full of wry humor and raw heartbreak. While a few of the songs here are never-before-heard originals, the vast majority of the tracklist consists of vintage tunes the band picked up during their 50-year career, some stretching as far back as the group’s earliest performances in the honky tonks around Lubbock, TX.
“I like to say that this album evolved more than it was recorded,” explains Joe Ely, who hosted the initial recording sessions and worked extensively on the tracks at his Spur Studios in Austin, TX. “We’d been chipping away at these songs for a while without ever really finishing anything, so when lockdown started, it seemed like the perfect time to really focus on it.”
The 15 tracks on Treasure of Love revisit songs they enjoyed playing from the early days and capturing them for the sheer joy of it. Not realizing at the time that they were actually making a record, the trio worked fast and loose in the studio, laying down raw, playful takes whenever they had free time between sessions or tours. It was only when the COVID-19 pandemic forced Ely, Gilmore, and Hancock to simultaneously clear all of their calendars that the band realized they had an album on their hands and the time to finally complete it.
“A lot of groups our age are either dead or not speaking to each other anymore,” says Gilmore, “but I think part of the reason The Flatlanders are still together is that we’ve all had our own separate careers along the way. We’re all such strange individualists, but we can co-captain this ship together because every time we come back to it, we feel that same magic we felt when we first started playing together.”
Treasure of Love Tracklist:
01) Moanin’ Of The Midnight Train
02) Long Time Gone
03) Snowin’ On Raton
04) She Smiles Like A River
05) Love Oh Love Please Come Home
06) Give My Love to Rose
07) Treasure of Love
08) Satin Shoes
09) The Ballad of Honest Sam
10) Mama Do the Kangaroo
11) She Belongs to Me
12) I Don’t Blame You
13) Mobile Blues
14) Ramblin’ Man
15) Sittin’ On Top of the World
Photo by Paul Mobley
The Flatlanders -- Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock -- add a bit of Texas twang to a 50-plus-year-old Bob Dylan song with their cover of "She Belongs to Me."
Dylan originally released "She Belongs to Me" in 1965, on his Bringing It All Back Home album, though it's since been covered by everyone from the Flying Burrito Brothers to Tna Turner. The Flatlanders' rendition is a bit jauntier than the original; Ely praises Gilmore's delivery of the lyrics for their "mystical universal appeal."
"I loved this song the first time I heard it and have never grown tired of it. Although it is written from the male perspective, it touches upon the plight of a strong woman living in (what is still) a man’s world," Gilmore reflects. "Dylan was prescient in his understanding of so many of the dilemmas that have now become almost common knowledge. Butch, Joe and I have shared an appreciation of Dylan’s artistry and wit from the beginning, and after performing this for so many years, I am happy to finally have a recorded version of it on a Flatlanders release."
Adds Hancock, "Jimmie's voice and this song still echo the miles and smiles the Flatlanders have shared."
Listen to the Flatlanders' "She Belongs to Me":
"She Belongs to Me" appears on Treasure of Love, the Flatlanders' forthcoming new album, their first in more than a decade. The trio recorded the bones of project's 15 songs at Ely's own Spur Studios, located in Austin, Texas, before the COVID-19 pandemic, then enlisted legendary musician Lloyd Maines to help them finish the record, which Maines co-produced with Ely and his wife Sharon.
Treasure of Love combines select unreleased originals with favorites from throughout the Flatlanders years together -- Townes Van Zandt's "Snowin' on Raton" and "She Smiles Like a River" by Leon Russell, for example -- which stretch back to the early 1970s. Their most recent album is 2009's Hills & Valleys, though The Odessa Tapes, which features unreleased recordings from the trio's earliest sessions, arrived in 2012.
"The thing that's always struck me about the Flatlanders is that, first and foremost, it's a band rooted in friendship," says Gilmore. "Whenever the three of us get together, it all feels so fresh and exciting and unpredictable."
Between disbanding in 1973 and reuniting after the 1990 reissue of their original recordings, the Flatlanders each cultivated successful solo careers, which continue today. That success, Gilmore reasons, is what's kept them together as a trio.
"We're all such strange individualists," he says, "but we can co-captain this ship together because every time we come back to it, we feel that same magic we felt when we first started playing together."
The Flatlanders Release New Original Song "Moanin' Of The Midnight Train"
The Flatlanders with Lloyd Maines. Photo: Sharon Ely
The Flatlanders, the iconic Texas-based trio of Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, released their new single "Moanin' Of The Midnight Train" off their forthcoming album Treasure of Love (out July 9th via Rack 'Em Records/Thirty Tigers). One of the group's originals featured on the album (this one penned by Hancock), the song is lean and gritty, evoking the vast emptiness of the West Texas landscape in all its bittersweet beauty and isolation.
Of the new song, Gilmore stated, "A soulful Joe Ely vocal and an emotionally complex Butch Hancock song is a powerful combination!" Ely continued, "'Moaning Of The Midnight Train' is a hard travelers guide to a ramblers vision of a long lost love."
"Moanin' Of The Midnight Train" follows the release of their previous song "She Belongs To Me," a stately and "jauntier" (The Boot) rendition of the Bob Dylan classic that splits the difference between Greenwich Village and Galveston. Lead single “Sittin’ on Top of the World” is also out now, which was embraced by American Songwriter and Rolling Stone among others.
Listen to "Moanin' Of The Midnight Train" HERE.
Pre-order Treasure of Love HERE.
