[Cover photo credit to Elija Kulmer]

Son Of The Velvet Rat have announced their new album Ghost Ranch will be released on March 22, 2024 via Fluff & Gravy / Missing Piece Records. They’ve also shared the lead single “Beautiful Day,” which features guest vocals from Jolie Holland.

Songwriter Georg Altziebler shares:

This is a song about a dream where the dreamer realizes he’s reliving somebody else’s life, seeing things through somebody else’s eyes. In this dream death doesn’t mean a thing. We all come and go and come and go again. The song was inspired by the passing of 2 close relatives.

Son of the Velvet Rat is the alter ego of songwriter Georg Altziebler and his wife Heike Binder, who a decade ago left their hometown of Graz, Austria for the “endless highway” of America. They came to rest in Joshua Tree, on the edge of California’s Mojave Desert.

They are known for their Folk-Pop melodies and ballads, infusing cabaret traditions of Old World masters like Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel and Fabrizio De André with the Old Testament prophecy and Kabbalistic visions of Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.

On September 9th, 2022 at the Harrison House in Joshua Tree, Georg and Heike debuted a collection of songs that would later comprise Ghost Ranch. Georg and Heike would properly document the pieces at Gar Robertson’s Red Barn Studio in Morongo Valley the following Spring, before finishing the album in Austria.