The title track to John Calvin Abney’s Transparent Towns (Tin Canyon/Well Kept Secret/Secretly Distribution) was among the 10 songs he wrote while recovering from vocal-cord surgery in 2023. With singing off the table for a year, the Oklahoma-raised singer, songwriter and guitarist had plenty of time to go deep and wide for his seventh solo LP. With his inner voice as his guide, he crafted a richly detailed small-town scenescape ravaged and remade by progress and loss. Musically, Abney finds ample rewards in the not-so-vast expanse between Elliott Smith’s Either/Or and Neil Young’s Harvest. And he’s in fine singing voice, too.
A busy touring guitarist who’s played with John Moreland, Ben Kweller, S.G. Goodman and others, Abney has released six other solo albums over a 10-year span. He self-produced Transparent Towns at Cardinal Song outside Oklahoma City, with studio owner Michael Trepagnier engineering and mixing. Heavily influenced by the heightened surreality of Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel Invisible Cities, Abney estimates he revised “Transparent Towns” about 10 times. The song also features backing vocals from partner and collaborator Lydia Loveless.
“Being in motion and seeing how the world at large and its minutiae changes … captivate me,” says Abney. “The mom-and-pop movie theater down the street from the school becomes a big-box market; the local pharmacy is now a fast-food chain; and the venues and houses you stayed up late in are paid parking lots and derelict shells. People transform, move on and pass on so quickly we can’t dare keep track of everything all at once. ‘Transparent Towns’ encapsulates what those histories are for me and how I reconcile them—even if it’s a fool’s errand.”
We’re proud to premiere John Calvin Abney’s “Transparent Towns.” Look for the album of the same name on September 19.
—Hobart Rowland
See John Calvin Abney live.
