On August 1st, 2025, author Mark Brend will publish a new book on the musician David Ackles via Jawbone Press. Ackles was active in the 1970s and remains largely unknown despite the promise of his work. In 1972, David Ackles’s third album, American Gothic, was released to critical acclaim in the Folk world and called “one of the greatest records ever made.” Yet the album, like its two predecessors, failed to sell, and after one more record, its creator simply vanished. He found work, raised a family, and died a couple of decades later, having never made another record.

Today, Ackles’s music is largely consigned to streaming and has not been properly repackaged. Yet his admirers range from Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, to Jim O’Rourke, to Genesis drummer turned solo artist Phil Collins. In 2003, when Elvis Costello interviewed Elton John for the first episode of his television show, Spectacle, the two spoke at some length about Ackles’s great talent before performing a duet of his song, “Down River”.

Drawing on conversations with Ackles himself, members of his family, collaborators including Bernie Taupin, and archive material, Down River is “a search for an artist who got lost.”

The book is described thus:

It positions Ackles as one of the great maverick talents of popular music—an equal of Scott Walker and Tom Waits—seeks to understand the disconnect between his obvious gifts and his commercial failure, and wonders about the fickleness of fame and cult status. How does this process of retrospective recognition work, and why does it happen for some but not others? Was Ackles’s music just too strange, or might his time yet come? And what do the answers to these questions say about the mythmaking of the popular music industry—and about us, the audience?

Author Mark Brend is a writer and musician. His first published music journalism was a Mojo ‘Buried Treasure’ feature about David Ackles’s first album, and the first chapter of his first book, American Troubadours: Groundbreaking Singer Songwriters Of The 60s (Backbeat, 2001), was about Ackles. He has written several other books about music, including The Sound Of Tomorrow: How Electronic Music Was Smuggled Into The Mainstream (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Strange Sounds: Offbeat Instruments And Sonic Experiments In Pop (Backbeat, 2005).