Throughout their lifespan as a band, The Lone Bellow have cast an indelible spell with their finespun songs of hard truth and unexpected beauty, frequently delivered in hypnotic three-part harmony. In a departure from their past work with elite producers like Aaron Dessner of The National and eight-time Grammy-winner Dave Cobb, the Nashville-based trio struck out on their own for their new album Love Songs for Losers, dreaming up a singular sound encompassing everything from arena-ready rock anthems to the gorgeously sprawling Americana tunes the band refers to as “little redneck symphonies.” Recorded at the possibly haunted former home of the legendary Roy Orbison, the result is an intimate meditation on the pain and joy and ineffable wonder of being human, at turns heartbreaking, irreverent, and sublimely transcendent.
 
“One of the reasons we went with Love Songs for Losers as the album title is that I’ve always seen myself as a loser in love—I’ve never been able to get it completely right, so this is my way of standing on top of the mountain and telling everyone, ‘It’s okay,’” says lead vocalist Zach Williams, whose bandmates include guitarist Brian Elmquist and multi-instrumentalist Kanene Donehey Pipkin. “The songs are looking at bad relationships and wonderful relationships and all the in-between, sometimes with a good deal of levity. It’s us just trying to encapsulate the whole gamut of experience that we all go through as human beings.”
 
The fifth full-length from The Lone Bellow, Love Songs for Losers arrives as the follow-up to 2020’s chart-topping Half Moon Light—a critically acclaimed effort that marked their second outing with Dessner, spawning the Triple A radio hits “Count On Me” and “Dried Up River” (both of which hit #1 on the Americana Singles chart). After sketching the album’s 11 songs in a nearby church, the band holed up for eight weeks at Orbison’s house on Old Hickory Lake, slowly carving out their most expansive and eclectic body of work yet. “I’ve always thought our music was so much bigger than anything we’ve shown on record before, and this time we turned over every stone until we got the songs exactly where they needed to be,” says Elmquist. Co-produced by Elmquist and Jacob Sooter, Love Songs for Losers also finds Pipkin taking the reins as vocal producer, expertly harnessing the rarefied vocal magic they’ve brought to the stage in touring with the likes of Maren Morris and Kacey Musgraves. “Singing together night after night for a decade allows you to understand what your bandmates are capable of, in a way that no one else can,” says Pipkin. “There are so many different qualities to our voices that had never been captured before, and producing this album ourselves was a nice opportunity to finally showcase that.” 
 
Recorded with their longtime bassist Jason Pipkin and drummer Julian Dorio, Love Songs for Losers embodies an unvarnished intensity—an element in full effect on its lead single “Gold,” a galvanizing look at the real-life impact of the opioid crisis. “We don’t ever try to write songs with an agenda, so with ‘Gold’ the idea was to tell the story from the perspective of someone in a hard situation—in this case, a guy who’s stuck in the downward spiral of addiction,” says Elmquist. In one of the most exhilarating turns on Love Songs for Losers, the chorus to “Gold” explodes in a wild collision of bright piano tones, potent beats, and massively stacked guitars. “We’ve sung ‘Gold’ as a folk song in the past, but for the album we wanted to really experiment and push our sound as far as it could go,” Elmquist notes.
 
Imbued with equal parts brutal honesty and heart-expanding wisdom, Love Songs for Losers opens on “Honey” and its synth-laced reflection on the more delicate aspects of enduring love. “‘Honey’ came from thinking about how my wife doesn’t like being called ‘honey’ or ‘baby’—she thinks it’s lazy, it always rubs her the wrong way,” says Williams. “It turned into a song about sometimes wanting to go back to when we were first in love, when everything was crazy and exciting and we were right on the verge of ruining each other’s lives at any second.” Later, on “Cost of Living,” Pipkin takes the lead vocal and shares a raw and lovely expression of grief, her voice shifting from fragile to soulful with impossible ease. A quietly shattering piano ballad featuring Elmquist on lead vocals, “Dreaming” channels the ache of lost love with exquisite specificity. “It’s a song about two people catching up with each other, and I love how the lyric goes from ‘How’s your mother?’ to ‘How’s that devil in your heart?’—there’s no middle ground, which feels very true to me,” says Williams. And on “Wherever Your Heart Is,” The Lone Bellow present a beautifully slow-building piece exploring a particularly powerful form of devotion. “I love those moments, even in friendships, when someone surprises you or reveals something you never knew about them before,” says Elmquist. “I think it’s so vital to any relationship to keep on chasing the mystery and maintain that curiosity, instead of just making your mind up about who or what the other person is.”
 
One of the most tender tracks on Love Songs for Losers, “Unicorn” unfolds with a cascade of heavenly melodies as Williams offers up an unabashed outpouring of affection for his wife Stacy (“I was kinda thinkin’ I could tell you my feelings/Sit you down and wreck you with some words that are pretty/I could say ‘I love you’ but I wanna say more/I think God made a unicorn”). “That’s definitely one where the physical location seeped into the song, and Roy Orbison’s ghost maybe led us toward the path we ended up on,” Williams points out.
 
Even in its most lighthearted moments, Love Songs for Losers bears the same heady depth of emotion that’s guided Williams since his earliest days as a songwriter—a period of time that followed a devastating horse-riding accident that left Stacy temporarily paralyzed. As she recovered, Williams learned to play guitar and began setting his journal entries to song, routinely performing at an open-mic night across the street from the hospital. Soon after Stacy regained her ability to walk, the couple moved to Brooklyn, where (after eight years as a solo artist) Williams joined Elmquist and Pipkin in founding The Lone Bellow. In 2013, the band made their auspicious debut with a self-titled, Charlie Peacock-produced album that quickly landed at No. 64 on the Billboard 200, later turning up on best-of-the-year lists from the likes of Paste and Pop Matters. With over 100 million career streams to date, The Lone Bellow’s past output also includes the Dessner-produced Then Came the Morning (a 2015 effort that earned them an Americana Music Award nomination) and Walk Into a Storm (a 2017 release produced by Cobb and hailed by NPR for its “warmly rousing, gospel-inflected Americana”).
 
For The Lone Bellow, the triumph of completing their first self-produced album marks the start of a thrilling new chapter in the band’s journey. “At the outset it was scary to take away the safety net of working with a big-name producer and lean on each other instead,” says Pipkin. “It took an incredible amount of trust, but in the end it was so exciting to see each other rise to new heights.” And with the release of Love Songs for Losers, the trio feel newly emboldened to create without limits. “This album confirmed that we still have beauty to create and put out into the world, and that we’re still having fun doing that after ten years together,” says Elmquist. “It reminded us of our passion for pushing ourselves out onto the limb and letting our minds wander into new places, and it sets me on fire to think of what we might make next.

 

The third full-length from Tall Heights, Juniors emerged from a period of profound turmoil and revelation for the Massachusetts duo. In the span of five months, Paul Wright and Tim Harrington experienced a convergence of events that included major health and substance-abuse crises among their closest loved ones, saying goodbye to Harrington's grandfather and to a beloved grandfather figure for Wright, and -- in far happier, yet still intense news -- the announcement that each of their wives was expecting. Compounded by a series of shake-ups in their professional life, that upheaval coincided with the start of the pandemic. Rather than succumbing to the tremendous pressure of that point in time, Tall Heights chose to confront the chaos by creating within it. The result: an album that precisely channels the pain, uncertainty, and unbridled joy of its inception.

As they set to work on Juniors, Harrington and Wright discovered an unexpected outcome of the loss that they'd endured: a shift in mindset that enabled them to embrace a boundless curiosity and exploratory spirit even more powerful than when they first formed Tall Heights (an endeavor that began when Harrington, on guitar, and Wright, on cello, used to busk on the streets of Boston back in the late 2000s). In a nod to the wide-eyed perspective that arose from the album's creation, the duo chose a title evocative of youthful wonder. "After everything we went through, we came to a place of understanding that we have no control, that each new day is an adventure we need to approach with beginner's eyes," says Harrington. Wright adds: "Through all the discomfort, we took it as our mission to stay humble and hungry, to know that everything will change and to be prepared to find something of real value in that -- and to find ourselves in it, too."

The follow-up to 2018's Pretty Colors For Your Actions, Juniors came to life at "The Tall House" -- the Northeastern Massachusetts home where Wright and Harrington lived together for six years with their wives, pets, and Harrington's firstborn son, eventually moving out in August 2020. In a departure from the elaborate production process that yielded its predecessor, the two musicians wrote and recorded most of Juniors in isolation, holing up on the third floor of the household they liken to a joyfully anarchic artist commune. "It all happened in this tiny, hectic, beautiful space where our wives were also working from home, both pregnant, and there's a dog and a cat that hated each other, and then Tim's toddler who'd just started walking would come barging in and start dancing mid-take, joining in a song with us," Wright recalls. Despite the nonstop disruption, Tall Heights soon found their way to a shapeshifting sound that illuminates their singularity like never before. "Because we were cut loose and isolated within this space and time, we ended up capturing something incredibly and uniquely us in the new sound we created," Harrington points out.

In putting the finishing touches on Juniors, Tall Heights headed to Omaha and worked with producers Mike Mogis (Paul McCartney, Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes) and Oliver Hill, who helped refine and enrich the backdrop of their emotionally raw songwriting. On the opening track "Keeps Me Light," the band muses on the ineffable comfort and safety of true connection, intensifying the track's radiant mood with the luminous vocals of a Berklee College of Music a cappella group called Upper Structure. Revealing the complexity of Juniors, Tall Heights then drift into the wistful reverie of "Locked Out," a song inspired by Wright's struggle to help his wife through a severe bout of anxiety. "Paul and I each wrote the lyrics to 'Locked Out,' which I think points back to how intertwined our lives have become," says Harrington. "It's so unlikely that I could have felt his pain as hard as I did -- but because I was living it too in that house, what's fiercely personal to Paul became fiercely personal to me."

The most commanding track on Juniors, "Hear It Again" took shape as Tall Heights messed around with an assortment of synthesizers they'd borrowed from their friend and tourmate Ben Folds, arriving at a tender rumination on home and belonging. "We've spent so much of our time living on the road, and that song is our way of asking, 'What if that's the place where we feel the most safety and consistency and stability?'" says Harrington. In a particularly poignant turn, "The Mountain" reflects on the losses that Harrington and Wright recently suffered, transforming that heartache into a moment of healing. "A friend had texted us a photo of his grandfather on the day before he died: he was sitting in a hospital bed looking out the window at the mountains, and the sun was shining on his face," says Wright. "That song came from thinking about our friend's grandmother saying goodbye to his grandfather and sending him off on his journey, but in a way it also speaks to how there's been so much collective loss over the past year." Meanwhile, on "Raindrop," Tall Heights offer up a meditation on emotional responsibility. "Sometimes a relationship can get intense in the wrong place and time," says Harrington. "So, in the end, it's a song about choosing which relationships deserve your all, and when to let things go and move on with your life."

Looking back on the tumultuous year that gave rise to their latest album, Harrington and Wright note that they've adopted the Juniors outlook as something of a spiritual ethos: a realization that every new endeavor -- no matter how familiar -- will undoubtedly present new challenges and extraordinary surprise, ultimately reminding them that they are still but juniors. "I feel ready to view each next chapter of Tall Heights as another round of Juniors," says Harrington. "This experience has emboldened us to create in any situation -- because when life got very intense, we doubled-down on what we care about the most: creating songs together. And it felt fresh and new in that context." And although leaving the Tall House proved nothing short of heartbreaking, the duo have found their devoted bond to be stronger than ever. "This record gave us the chance to really understand what we have in each other as weird partners on the great journey of self-exploration," says Wright. "We know now that the Tall House can be a state of mind, not just a place of refuge. So while chaos continues, we're able to fully see the beauty that can come from it."