Stream Jon Langford’s New Album ‘Four Lost Souls’

Jon Langford has led an enviable life. He’s a founding member of bands like the Mekons and the Waco Brothers, a visual artist with commissions ranging from Dogfish Head Brewery to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, a radio host, an activist, a playwright… We could go on and on.

Now Langford is preparing to release a new solo album, Four Lost Souls. The album came about after a chance encounter between Langford and bassist Norbert Putnam at Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame, where Langford was commissioned to provide portraits for the “Dylan, Cash, and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City” exhibit in 2015. Putnam invited Langford down to Muscle Shoals to record at Nutthouse Studio, and Four Lost Souls was born.

“I met Norbert Putnam at the Country Music Hall of Fame a couple of years ago and he told me I sang like a pirate and I should come down to Muscle Shoals and make an album,” Langford says. “He was the original bass player in the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section, moved to Nashville, and became a big cat session man before teaming up with the likes of Henry Mancini, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Elvis Presley and producing a slew of hit albums.”

Langford, Putnam, and Swampers David Hood and Randy McCormick got together to record the day after the 2016 election, an event that had a profound effect on what would become the final album.

“I am an old punk rocker from South Wales but I had a few cards up my sleeve,” he adds. “I got a free piano from a tattooed brewmaster from Indiana and set about writing some punk rock pirate songs about my love for the beautiful things that blossomed in the South and the dark shadows its twisted history casts upon my adopted home (America) today. Then I gave those tunes to Bethany Thomas and Tawny Newsome to see if there was an ounce of soul to be squeezed out of them and we headed south.”

Listen to Four Lost Souls in its entirety before its September 22 release date below.