Townes Van Zandt - A Far Cry From Dead

When Townes Van Zandt died on New Year’s Day 1997, he left behind a stack of tapes: just his voice and guitar, recorded from the late ’80s through the early ’90s at Texhoma Music Group Studio, at his next door neighbor’s home studio in Nashville, and at Jack Clement’s Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa. He left them to his widow, Jeanene Van Zandt, and two years later they became A Far Cry From Dead, a Grammy-nominated posthumous album and the first of his records to come out on a major label.

Jeanene worked with producer Eric Paul to build full-band arrangements around those bare performances, bringing in some of Nashville’s most trusted players. Guitarist Richard Bennett (Mark Knopfler, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell), percussionist Kenny Malone (Ray Charles, George Jones, Johnny Cash) and Charlie McCoy (Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Waylon Jennings) all play here, and they frame the songs without crowding the man at the center of them.

The thirteen tracks run through the core of the Van Zandt songbook, including “Pancho and Lefty,” “To Live’s to Fly,” “Waitin’ ‘Round to Die,” “For the Sake of the Song,” “Rex’s Blues” and “Tower Song,” alongside “Sanitarium Blues” and “Squash.” These are late-career readings, sung by a writer who had lived inside the songs for decades, and the vocals were praised on release as some of the finest he ever put to tape.

This is the first time A Far Cry From Dead has ever been pressed on vinyl. The single LP comes from TVZ Records, the label owned and operated by the Van Zandt family, with seven songs on side A and six on side B.