The Flatlanders New Release
The Flatlanders
To Issue ‘Treasure of Love’
Out July 9, 2021
The Flatlanders, the iconic Texas-based trio of Butch Hancock, Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore have just announced their first album of newly recorded music in more than twelve years.
Treasure of Love will be released on July 9 via Rack’em Records/Thirty Tigers (via Cooking Vinyl Australia). 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.
“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 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 Ely.
Completed during COVID-19 lockdowns with the help of longtime friend and collaborator Lloyd Maines, Treasure of Love finds The Flatlanders serving up a collection of lively twang, harmonies, humor and heartbreak. While a few of the songs here are never-before-heard originals, the vast majority of the track list consists of vintage tunes the band picked up during their fifty-year career, some stretching as far back as the group’s earliest performances in the honky tonks around Lubbock, Texas.
“I like to say that this album evolved more than it was recorded,” explains 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 fifteen tracks 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, 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.”
Jimmie Dale Gilmore
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
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The Flatlanders New Release
The Flatlanders New Release
