For more than fifty years, Terry Allen has navigated an artistic path that bears little resemblance to the flat straightaways of his Lubbock youth. There’s a good chance he’s your favorite artist’s favorite country singer, or your favorite country singer’s favorite artist. Enter Truckload Of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen, Brendan Greaves’ 500+ page epic released on Hachette Books on March 19th. We sat down with Greaves to discuss this exhilarating investigation of a life spent in the act of constant creation.
Category: Terry Allen
Terry Allen :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
A singer-songwriter as acclaimed for his art career, Terry Allen has always done things his own way. From his blood-soaked travelogue debut Juarez, to sculptures that reside in airports, he’s devoted his life to staggering bodies of work that move effortlessly between gallery walls, theatrical stages, and public airwaves. And that’s barely scratching the surface…
Terry Allen :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Terry Allen is a maker of things. A sculptor, illustrator, playwright, collagist, and, perhaps most famously, a singer and songwriter who, over the last five decades, has amassed an extensive catalog of avant-country gold. His 1975 album Juarez, a striking and brilliant concept album that plays as a kind of sunburned, southwestern Badlands, and 1979’s sprawling Lubbock (On Everything), a rollicking and wry send-up of Allen’s West Texas hometown, are rightly held up as unimpeachable masterpieces of proto-americana music. Each have recently received extensive reissues by the North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors, who will also issue Allen’s forthcoming new album.
Open Door To The Galaxy: The Radio Plays of Jo Harvey and Terry Allen
With a series of radio plays recorded between 1986-1992, Terry Allen and Jo Harvey presented the mythic Southwest, a wide open imaginary landscape haunted by denizens Allen describes as “climates” rather than characters. A handful of these fated souls are profiled in Pedal Steal + Four Corners, a handsome collection of Terry’s longform audio works by Paradise of Bachelors that spans an LP, CDs, and a book rich in lore and photographic documentation.
Terry Allen :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
An outlaw of his own accord, Terry Allen’s output across a drove of mediums has remained open and engaging for over four decades. The Lubbock, TX native is a stalwart storyteller, oftentimes […]
Terry Allen :: Juarez
Terry Allen’s 1975 debut, Jaurez , is a story of a Texican Badman. It’s a western pastoral told through timeless songs and gentle orchestrations covered in dusty ragweed and a thurderstorm […]