Blaze Foley never got the audience his songs deserved while he was alive — shot dead in Austin in 1989 at 39, he spent his career writing the kind of plainspoken, devastating country songs that other people would later turn into hits. Now, a new tribute album is reintroducing his catalog to a generation of songwriters who clearly never stopped listening.
Sittin’ With Blaze arrives August 7 on Lost Art Records, pulling together a deep bench of contemporary artists — Lucy Dacus, Lucinda Williams, Joshua Ray Walker, John Moreland, Lydia Loveless, and more — to cover thirteen early Foley songs. The source material comes from his “tree house” days in Georgia, demos recorded in the mid-1970s that Lost Art first released in 2010 as Sittin’ By the Road. This new record treats those early songs as a songbook worth passing around.
Lost Art kicked things off this month with two preview tracks: a hushed, unhurried take on “If I Could Only Fly” from Phosphorescent —whose own songwriting we covered back in May — and a rendition of “Election Day” from Austin’s Uncle Lucius. The pairing is a fitting one. Phosphorescent’s Matthew Houck has talked about coming to Foley’s writing the way most serious songwriters eventually do, in the same breath as Lucinda Williams, Townes Van Zandt, and Guy Clark — and fittingly, it’s Williams herself who closes out the album with her own version of “If I Could Only Fly,” bookending the record with two takes on the same song.
Sittin’ With Blaze is out digitally August 7, with a physical release following in the fall. Hear both preview tracks now, and revisit Phosphorescent’s catalog at phosphorescentmusic.com.
A curated pick by Planet Mars Music Editorial Staff and crafted with the help of AI