[Cover photo credit to Valerie Fremin]

Austin, Texas-based singer/songwriter Terry Klein has announced his upcoming album, Hill Country Folk Music, his 5th album overall, and his 3rd made in Nashville with Producer Thomm Jutz.

The album arrives on November 7, 2025, and Thomm Jutz recorded and produced the album at his Nashville studio over four days in August 2025.

The album’s first single, “I Used to be Cool” is out now.

Terry Klein says about the new album: 

“At some point in the spring of 2025, I came to a realization: I’m a singer-songwriter and it’s my job to put songs out into the world. What happens after I do that isn’t up to me almost at all. But the putting out music is a thing that’s under my control. I write a lot of songs. I like a small percentage of what I write enough to share it with other people. Songs accumulate and sometimes I forget about them and only remember them when some person asks me to play one of them that touched them. Every record I’ve put out since the first one has been a mix of songs I’ve written since making the preceding record and songs that I wrote some time before that. But I do have this strict rule that you don’t go into the studio, you don’t even think about booking studio time, until you have ten songs that you really, truly, deeply love. Holding myself to that standard is, I think, why people have tended to like the records I’ve made, said that there’s “no filler”, etc. That plus the fact that I scrupulously avoid making my records all one thing, all one sound. Dynamics are important.

So when I came to that realization, I think after I wrote “Hopelessness Is Going Around”, I went back and thought about some of the older unrecorded songs that people ask me to play now and then, songs like “The Job Interview Song”, “Musconetcong River”, “Yellow Butterfly”, and “A Quiet Place to Sit.” I love those songs. I enjoy playing them. Put them together with what I’ve written since Leave The Light On and there’s a record in there somewhere.

I started recording demos at the end of May of 2025. The very first day, there was a microburst in our area and we lost power for five days and I was kind of like “Does the universe not want me to make this record?” But we did get power and I did record some demos and I sent Thomm Jutz a text and said “I think I have some songs and maybe it’s time to make another album” and he responded within actual seconds “I’m in” without having heard any of the songs yet. We traded more texts and settled on getting into the studio in early August. I flew to Nashville on the 3rd and we talked a bit about the songs and what we were hearing. We’d make album from the 4th to the 7th. Neither of us thought we’d need that much time and we didn’t.

But here was the thing: I was getting over a cold I’d picked up (thanks, Hank) on tour about a week earlier. When I woke up on Monday morning and went for a run, I was wondering to myself whether I was going to be able to pull this off, whether I was going to have to book a flight back to Nashville to not sound like Ethel Merman. The run helped, ibuprofen helped, and I got to Thomm’s studio at 9:45 in the morning on the 4th. We tracked nine songs from ten to one. At least a few of  them were done in one take. The band was the same band as the preceding two records, Thomm, Tim Marks on bass, and Lynn Williams on drums. I felt as present and intentional during those three hours as I think I’ve ever felt in my life. That afternoon, Thomm and I punched in in a small handful of spots where I’d mispronounced a word or had a pitch issue (I’m human) and we were done by about five. ​​A fun fact for the music nerds is that the snare drum on this album is supposedly the snare drum used to record Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Neil Young’s Harvest. 

Justin Moses, who plays fiddle and dobro (he just won an IBMA award for this, which is a big deal) and I would bet a lot of other things, came in Tuesday morning and we tracked a couple more songs as an acoustic trio with Thomm. The legendary Mike Compton added some mandolin on Tuesday afternoon. Literally as soon as Mike pulled his mandolin out of his case and played a few notes I was like “oh boy I know that sound.” If you’ve listened to any songs off of the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, you know that sound too. Finn Goodwin-Bain came in in the late afternoon and added some piano and organ to several tunes, making this the first time Thomm and I have put any kind of keyed instrument on one of the records we’ve made together. Scotty Sanders came on Wednesday afternoon and put steel on a few songs. And that was it.

The sequence started to reveal itself to me on Tuesday. We had some pretty much final mixes on Wednesday. Thomm knows his rooms and knows his equipment, and knows what instruments are supposed to sound like. There’s no agonizing, no opportunities to overthink. By the time we hit those final mixes and I listened to them in order, I had this odd feeling and I was surprised by it. The feeling, which I’d never had before, was that I thought I might have just made my best record. Once we got the masters a week or so later, that suspicion had hardened into something a little closer to a conviction. I’m pretty damn proud of the other four records, about the songs I’ve put out into the world, too. But this felt like such a clear cohesive thing with a perceivable trajectory through a bunch of different sounds and emotions. 

Somewhere along the way, I decided to call the album Hill Country Folk Music. One of the things that attracted me to the music scene in Central Texas was how much of a melting pot it is. You have Stevie Ray Vaughan, Doug Sahm, Robert Earl Keen, even the Butthole Surfers for crying out loud. That spoke to me because I don’t want my songs to all be one thing. Folk music is like that. It’s not all Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor. There’s also room for Woody and Leadbelly and Guy Clark and Mary Gauthier. My love for Central Texas and for folk music aren’t complete and unquestioning, but both of them have given me a home and I’ll always be grateful for that.”