The cult soul singer Swamp Dogg has announced details for Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, his upcoming country-tinged album featuring contributions from John Prine, Jenny Lewis, Justin Vernon and more.
The album, produced by Ryan Olson, arrives two years after his Justin Vernon-assisted, Olson-produced 2018 comeback record Love, Loss & Auto-Tune. That record added modern textures and electronic production to the singer’s Seventies R&B.
But for his latest LP, Swamp Dogg, who’s flirted with country music since the beginning of his five-decade-plus career, reached back to an idea he’d had for decades. “If you notice, I use a lot of horns,” Swamp Dogg recently said in a press release. “But actually, if you listen to my records before I start stacking shit on it, I’m country. I sound country.” The record’s first single is “Sleeping Without You Is a Dragg,” a laid-back country-soul ballad featuring Lewis and Vernon.
The 77-year-old eccentric singer has always wanted to make a country record. “I look at time, and I look at my age and all that bullshit, and I thought, ‘Man, I better do that before time closes in on my ass,’” he told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “There’s still so many things that I want to do.”
Swamp Dogg’s latest album features two guest vocal appearances from his old-friend John Prine, whose song “Sam Stone” Swamp Dogg covered in 1972. The two spent a day in the studio earlier in the year. “John’s a funny motherfucker,” Swamp told Rolling Stone. “And where I tend to not be as country as I want to be, John Prine brings it home.”
Sorry You Couldn’t Make It is in stores March 6th.
