[Cover photo credit to Julian Lambert]

For the past thirty-five years, musician, writer, and painter Trever M. Keith has played across the country. But it’s relatively recently that the California-born and bred Keith has gotten to know his adopted home of middle Tennessee more deeply. This has led him to look more closely at a genre from present and his past: Country music.

His new Americana and Country album, We Drank from a Poisoned Well, will arrive on July 10th, 2026. The title track and accompanying video are out now.

Growing up in the 1970s, Keith found country music around every corner of his childhood, from film and television programs to pop radio. Spending the past fifteen years living in Nashville, Tennessee, helped the frontman of the SoCal Punk band Face to Face reconnect to the era of country music on which he grew up, but also led to the discovery of music from that time period that he’d initially missed out on.

Keith says:

My reconnection and discovery of this music has inspired what I think is a true-to-form classic country record that takes me back to a simpler time in life.

The album’s title track is a “portrait of a dysfunctional romance in which the narrator feels cheated, lied to, and weary from years of a one-sided pursuit.” But the song has a deeper resonance that applies to America, as does the title to the album.

On the album, ideas of “American strife permeate, namely, the demands everyone puts on the idea of what this country should be.”

He continues:

We all want something from it, and many times, the idea of what we think it should be doesn’t live up to our expectations. In the end, it’s not about division or blame. It’s a recognition that, for all the noise and fractures, Americans share more than they differ—everyone has been sipping from the same tainted source, carrying the same quiet disillusionment. We’re all in it together, and we share the frustration.