Like pretty much every band on Earth, there was a lot of waiting around going on in 2020 for The Parson Red Heads. The completion of their fifth studio album, Lifetime of Comedy, was put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic freezing everybody in place for months, and a process that had begun just prior to the global closure was forced to reconvene at a snail’s pace once studios could open back up for small, intimate sessions.
But Lifetime of Comedy, while forged from within the timeline of such a touch-and-go era, already had a story of perseverance—a sentiment in their music that longtime fans of the Portland-based Americana/psych band have treasured. The band’s founding guitarist, Sam Fowles, departed the band following the release of their 2017 LP, Blurred Harmony, and the Parsons were forced to ask themselves some tough questions.
The band turned to their live guitarist Jake Smith to step in, and quickly realized they wanted to approach their new record through a new lens.
On Lifetime of Comedy, Way, Smith and the rest of the Parson Red Heads—Brette Marie Way (drums, vocals), Robbie Augspurger (bass), and Raymond Richards (multi-instrumentalist, producer)—navigate new terrain, excavating the bedrock of their well-honed sound and allowing it to be remolded into an altogether new alchemy of songcraft. While still quintessentially a Parson Red Heads record, Lifetime… is, as Way contends, the most collaborative of their recordings to date.
Allowing the songs to evolve through the prism of a new dynamic within the group gave space for songs like “All I Wanted” , the FIRST SINGLE from the LP.
Lifetime of Comedy will be released on 11/13 via Fluff and Gravy Records (North America) and You Are The Cosmos (Europe).