Caleb Landry Jones, the enigmatic and multi-talented artist, is set to release his highly anticipated fourth album, Hey Gary, Hey Dawn, on the esteemed Sacred Bones label.

Renowned as a multi-instrumentalist crafting intricate cinematic works that hover on the fringes of prog, Jones breaks new ground with a deliberate focus on live performance for his latest record. Jones has in fact intentionally designed Hey Gary, Hey Dawn with the live stage in mind, a previously missing element in his musical career.

Assembling a formidable band, he sets the stage for an enthralling experience, kickstarting a month-long residency in Austin, Texas, this February, culminating in a standout performance at SXSW. The residency serves as a precursor to a series of planned US and international tours, promising to bring the album’s electrifying energy to audiences worldwide.

The music is Jones’s heaviest to date, and though often reticent about direct influences and resistant to categorizations, he weaves a sonic tapestry that hints at punk and grunge elements within his signature kaleidoscopic symphonies. “It’s not for me to say what it is. I’m only here to give it up,” he asserts, emphasizing the individual listening experience. But even though these songs are his most succinct, they are anything but simple. Over 20 talented musicians, including a quartet, contributed to the album, adding layers of depth and complexity to this dynamic collection of songs that seamlessly traverse a multitude of genres.

Since his last album Gadzooks Vol. 2 Jones has been steadfast in making visual art, some of which graces the album art for Hey Gary, Hey Dawn. Simultaneously, he has continued to captivate audiences on the big screen, starring in Luc Besson’s acclaimed film Dogman and preparing for multiple roles in 2024.

Hey Gary, Hey Dawn is a testament to Caleb Landry Jones’s artistic evolution, demonstrating his ability to push boundaries while maintaining a distinct and indescribable quality. With a blend of intensity, vulnerability, and musical virtuosity, Jones invites listeners to embark on a journey that transcends traditional genres, promising an immersive experience that resonates long after the final note.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hey Dawn
2. Too Sharp To Be My Carrot
3. The Moonkey Light Hey Dawn
4. Spot A Fly
5. Corn Mine
6. Your Favorite Song
7. Hey Gary
8. The Bonzo Bargain
9. Masandoia
10. He Sued His Wife
11. Useless
12. The Pageant Thieves

Don't let the prestigious acting career fool you, Caleb Landry Jones is a bonafide musical maverick. And on his forthcoming release Gadzooks Vol. 2 he places himself in a lineage of outsider artists, many with only a thin thread tethering them to this reality, who are capable of reaching into the cosmic realms of imagination and bringing back a musical masterpiece. And while most artists don't save some of the best music of their career for an album with Vol. 2 in the title, Jones is an artist for whom chronology is a slippery substance.

The album was recorded with Nic Jodoin in the famed Valentine Recording Studios simultaneous with the mixing of his debut album The Mother Stone. The team invited a slew of heavy hitting musicians to the studio to contribute to the magic. The resulting album sounds a bit like pink elephants in cowboy hats making asmr... at least for the first 20 seconds before it seamlessly changes entirely.

One of Jones's greatest musical gifts is his ability to cover a vast energetic and sonic landscape, with a wide array of instrumentation and vocal stylings over a wholly unique song structure, in a way that feels cohesive and euphoric. And while all his records have an ecstatic quality Gadzooks Vol 2. is perhaps his most soothing and sublime collection to date. Each song has at least a dozen ear worming hooks, all so satisfying you feel a deep longing as they fade until you realize they are being woven into yet another groove-laden, toe-tapping peak. A continual mic drop on an orgasmic wonder wheel.

And given the chameleonic quality to the music we asked Caleb Landry Jones to introduce you to the album himself so here are some of his thoughts: "I'm aware of only half the picture. It comes down upon me like a heavy rain. The psycho Deli is out of mustard and all the Porn Stars won’t leave their homes. I’m out only to get myself, but don’t get in the way. The bugs which throw themselves at windows rarely get their say. "

TRACK LISTING

1. Croc Killers 2
2. Little Lion Blues
3. Touchdown Yolk
4. The Shanty Shine
5. Georgie Borge (The Termite)
6. Jeepers
7. Anyone But You
8. Slink On Fido
9. The Puppet Rush
10. Croc Killers 1

Caleb Landry Jones is a continual creator. The Texan-born star found fame as an actor - you’ll recognise him from key roles in X-Men: First Class, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, amongst others - but music is perhaps his first love, and his source of greatest comfort. A chance encounter with famed auteur Jim Jarmusch brought him into the orbit of Sacred Bones, and the stalwart independent released Caleb’s 2020 debut album The Mother Stone. Psychedelic in a defiantly non-retro way, this indulgent, freewheeling trip won critical acclaim, but masked a secret - he’d already finished another album.

Filming alongside Tom Hanks in dystopian themed Finch, Caleb found himself writing during those long evenings after the shoot in locations across New Mexico, idling away his hours by focusing on creativity. “I need it,” he says, “I’ve tried working without it. On one acting job, I intentionally didn’t bring a guitar to try and do it without music... but that didn’t last long. I need to create something - it could be a drawing, it could be a song - because otherwise I feel like I’m wasting time. Which is something I do plenty of on my own!”

With his creative faculties burning, Caleb knew he had to get straight back into the studio when filming stopped. Linking with the same cast who formed The Mother Stone, he resumed his partnership with producer Nic Jodoin, based out of the elegant Valentine Recording Studio in Los Angeles. A studio steeped in history - everyone from Bing Crosby to Frank Zappa worked there - he interrupted mixing sessions for his own debut album in order to focus on something different.

Gadzooks Vol. 1 is unlike anything you’ve heard before - comparisons range from Skip Spence’s fractured masterpiece Oar through to skewed troubadour Robyn Hitchcock, via John Lennon’s black moods on The White Album and Frank Zappa’s caustic surrealism. Recording to tape, Caleb would hack away at each take, re-assembling the songs like Escher diagrams. “It’s like when you’re swimming in the pool,” he smiles, “and you’re doing a bit of butterfly, and then that gets old after a while. So then you start doing breaststroke, and then that gets old after a while. I think it’s just a reaction from the place where we were before.”

Part of a flood-tide of creativity - as its title suggests, a second half to this album is already on the horizon - Gadzooks Vol. 1 is thrilling, shocking, and wonderfully entertaining. Each song starts and finishes in entirely unique places, often totally divorced from each other. “I’m trying to write something very simple,” he says, “And it gets really abstract because I don’t know any other way.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Never Wet
2. Yesterday Will Come
3. The Loon (A Gate Away)
4. Bogie
5. Gloria
6. California
7. For A Short Time (There Was Loving)
8. A Slice Of Dream
9. This Won’t Come Back

“I think most of it takes place in dreams,” Caleb Landry Jones says of his debut solo album, The Mother Stone. “I’m talking more about dreams than I am about what’s happened in the physical realm. Or I’m talking about both, and you’re not sure what’s what.”

Caleb Landry Jones was born in Garland, Texas in 1989 and comes from a long line of fiddle players. Three, maybe four generations back, on his mother’s side. His grandfather wrote jingles for commercials, his mother was a singer-songwriter who taught piano lessons in the house, and his father was a contractor who did a lot of work for the Dallas music-equipment retailer Brook Mays and knew a guy if you needed a bass or a banjo. But Jones is not sure if you can hear any of this in his music and he does not play the fiddle.

Jones has been writing and recording music since age 16, around the same time he started acting professionally. Played in a band called Robert Jones for a minute, lost his guitar player to higher education, moved into his own place, and broke up with somebody, at which point the songs really started coming hard and fast.

“I started playing guitar and playing more keys,” he says, “and then started writing record after record after record after record, because I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was a good way of healing. And it felt like as soon as I started doing it, it felt like it needed to happen all the time.”

In the ensuing years he’d spend a lot of time carrying unrecorded songs around in his head like goldfish in a bag, waiting for a chance to record them in marathon sessions in his parents’ barn. “You gotta play the songs every day, or every two or three days, to keep ‘em,” he says. “Otherwise I forget them.” Sometimes the ideas fuse together, one chapter to the next; this is how songs grow into sevenplus-minute epics like the ones on The Mother Stone. His back catalog is around seven hundred songs deep— a whole discography of full albums, most of them unheard outside the barn, at least for now.

TRACK LISTING

1. Flag Day / The Mother Stone
2. You’re So Wonderfull
3. I Dig Your Dog
4. Katya
5. All I Am In You / The Big Worm
6. No Where’s Where Nothing’s Died
7. Licking The Days
8. For The Longest Time
9. The Hodge-Podge Porridge Poke
10. I Want To Love You
11. The Great I Am
12. Lullabbey
13. No Where’s Where Nothing’s Died (A Marvelous Pain) 
14. Thanks For Staying
15. Little Planet Pig