[Cover photo credit to Barbara FG]
Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Joe Ely has announced his new album Driven to Drive, due out August 2, 2024 via Rack ‘Em Records / Thirty Tigers. Driven to Drive is actually Ely’s first road album, featuring a collection of songs inspired by his travels from different eras of his career, which spans five decades.
Along with the announcement, he has shared the official video for the album’s first single “Odds of the Blues” (feat. Bruce Springsteen). The video was directed by Matthew Eskey and pulls from home video footage shot by Joe Ely, his wife Sharon and their families over the years.
Joe Ely says about the track:
I got the idea for the song from hanging out at an all night after hours joint on the edge of east Lubbock called TV’s… there was always a dice game in the back room, the pool table had a bad lean, and the jukebox mainly played old blues songs. I wrote the song later when I put my studio together in Austin. I asked Bruce recently if he would like to sing with me on this song and he said he’d love to.
We’ve been long lost friends for a long time. One of my memories of us singing together was in Dublin, Ireland when we both got on stage with Jerry Lee Lewis and Shane MacGowan and sang ‘Great Balls of Fire.’
Self-produced by Ely, Driven to Drive stitches together recordings over several decades at Spur Studios, his home recording facility outside of Austin, assisted by musician/neighbors Joel Guzman on accordion, keyboardist Bill Guinn, singer Eddie Beethoven, fiddler Richard Bowden, guitarist Jeff Plankenhorn and engineer Pat Manske, who also added percussion.
Driven to Drive is the follow-up to Ely’s 2022 album Flatland Lullaby. Ely is also one-third of the iconic Texas-based trio The Flatlanders along with Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. In 2021, the band released Treasure of Love, their first album in over 12 years.
Regarding the album, Ely adds:
I’ve been traveling all my life in search of whatever I find. Revisiting some of my studio files, I noticed there were a lot of songs I had written on the road about traveling. I had recorded them in my studio every time I got off the road. I compiled a selection of songs like that from different eras. That’s Driven to Drive.
