Hello. You’ve reached Time & Temperature.
Between 2015 and 2025 I released four solo albums, signed copies of which are now available on my site. They all rock, but by definition and design, no two are alike, though the two in the middle were produced by Sam Cohen—even those couldn’t be much more dissimilar. I’m wildly proud of these albums and I hope you check them out if they somehow slipped past you amidst the noise of our everyday lives.
The Traveler found me embedded in a band called Black Prairie, which is to say I was joined by the greater part of The Decemberists as well as the brilliant Annalisa Tornfelt. It was a real band into which I stepped for those sessions. They welcomed me into their fold and nurtured me during a rough time—it was my last recording session before I chose a life of sobriety. The result is a thorny but beautiful album. I love it but I can’t listen to it much. I’m glad that “Reasons To live” closes out the sequence as it serves as a sweet antidote to the darkness.
The Messenger brought me to Sam Cohen, a producer who reminds me in many ways of the great Jon Brion. Sam sees the architecture in music and approaches his job with a grave yet joyful sense of responsibility. The rhythm section with whom he paired me, Brian Betancourt and Ray Rizzo, seemed to get me immediately and gave me such a gift with their performances. When the time rolled around for the next album, we were locked down by the pandemic and Sam had the idea to approach the writing and recording of the album as collaborators. We wrote and recorded each of the songs on The Misfit in the space of a day. Just the two of us. It was wild, y’all. The sheer audacity of it, along with the sounds Sam employed (synths! drum machines!), makes this an outlier among an already disparate body of work—my solo records have all leaned towards some experimentation, but this one took me out of my comfort zone for sure.
Finally, A lifetime of riding by night was the culmination of decades of collaboration with my oldest friend, mentor and Old 97’s brother Murry Hammond who took over the role of producer for the first time since he’d produced my debut solo album all the way back in my high school days. I recorded all my vocals and guitars a few days before vocal cord surgery sidelined me for four months, during which time Murry made the whole album and presented it to me as a fait accompli. Another gift. I’m a very lucky man.
I’m looking forward to leaning into more frequent releases of smaller batches of songs—singles and EP’s for instance. But I love creating a full-length immersive listening experience as is the case with each of these.
Here’s an early-order link to a limited quantity of signed LP’s of these four albums, available a day early to all you kind substack folks.
After the paywall, the hardcore subscribers will get to see videos of me in my home office performing a favorite song from each of these albums. Enjoy!
yrs,
Rhett
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