Townes Van Zandt - Sky Blue

In early 1973, Townes Van Zandt sat down in the Atlanta home studio of his friend Bill Hedgepeth, a journalist and musician, and rolled tape. No band, no producer, no label looking over his shoulder: just a voice, a guitar and a trusted confidant in the room. The recordings then sat unheard for forty-six years, until Van Zandt’s family opened the vault and released them in 2019 on what would have been his 75th birthday.

The eleven solo acoustic performances catch a writer at the height of his powers working through his own songbook. “Pancho & Lefty,” barely a year old at the time, appears alongside “Rex’s Blues,” “Silver Ship of Andilar” and a reworked “Blue Ridge Mtns.,” and his dark sense of humor runs through “Snake Song” and “Dream Spider.” The real prizes are two originals that had never been heard in any form, “All I Need” and the title track, both easily worthy of the studio albums he made in his lifetime. He rounds out the set with a Richard Dobson song, Tom Paxton’s “Last Thing on My Mind” and the old Tennessee murder ballad “The Hills of Roane County.”

Sky Blue was conceived by his wife and literary executor Jeanene together with his children J.T., Will and Katie Bell, and it plays less like an archival release than a lost album. The intimacy is the point. This is Townes with his guard down, playing for a friend.

Released by the family’s TVZ Records with Fat Possum, the LP comes housed in a gatefold jacket with liner notes by John Lomax III, Van Zandt’s former manager, and includes a download code. One for anyone who believes the songs were always enough on their own.