Bloodlines: Vinyl LP

The first-ever vinyl reissue of Allens manifold, moving fourth album, remastered from the original analogue tapes. Deluxe LP edition features 140g virgin vinyl; a gatefold jacket, inner sleeve with restored, new, and alternate art and photos by Terry and Jo Harvey Allen and friends, insert with lyrics and original notes. On his fourth album, acclaimed songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen contemplates kinship the ways sex and violence stitch and sever the ties of family, faith, and society with skewering satire and affection alike.Bloodlinescompiles thematically related but disparate recordings from miscellaneous sources both theatrical and historical: two songs written for plays; two full-band reprises of selections fromJuarez; the irreverent hellfire-hitchhiker-on-highway ballad Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy (featuring Joe Ely); and the poignant eponymous ode to the arteries of ancestry and landscape (the debut recording of eight year-old Natalie Maines, later covered by Lucinda Williams).

Since 1970, when they met in Allens studio in his hometown of Lubbock, Texas, one of songwriter and visual artist Terry Allens great foils and friends was the sometimes cantankerous but always brilliant art critic and writer Dave Hickey, with whom he sparred on topics musical, visual, and beyond (and to whom this reissue is dedicated in memoriam, in the wake of his passing in 2021.) Hickey, a fellow Texan paddling against the currents of the hermetic New York centric art world, was an accomplished songwriter in his own right, and he and Terry pushed each other to refine their respective practices. In 1983, the two were thick as thieves brothers in blood and Hickeys wry but big-hearted presence haunts the history and periphery ofBloodlines, the album Terry released in June of that year.

In a 1984 review ofBloodlines, the L.A. Herald Examiner called Allen one of the most compelling American songwriters working today making the most unique art-pop of our time, elsewhere comparing him not only to Moon Mullican and Jerry Lee Lewis, but also to the Velvet Underground and Philip Glass (probably the first time that unlikely quartet ever appeared together in one sentence). In 1983, against all odds, such sentiments were growing in underground prominence, as Allens records gained a fanatical word-of-mouth following they werent easy to find in those days. Recorded piecemeal at Caldwell Studios in Lubbock, in sessions spanning August 1982 through January 1983, Terry self-released it, like all his previous records, on his own Fate Records imprint.