After a long separation, the Jayhawks estranged principals Gary Louris and Mark Olson have finished Ready for the Flood, their first studio collaboration in more than a decade. With a release scheduled for sometime in September, the new record by the iconic alt-country songwriters will repair a musical partnership that ended with 1995s Tomorrow the Green Grass, leaving Louris to front various Jayhawks line-ups minus his right-hand man.
And while Louris recently told the Associated Press that musical reunions are generally a bad idea, he said, "We're kind of unusual, we've always been. Hopefully we'll just break the mold. We'll show how maybe when sometimes people get back together they can make music that's as good [or better than] they did in the past, and it's not a shadow of what it was just to make money."
Ready for the Flood was produced by Black Crowes front-man Chris Robinson and recorded in L.A. back in January 2007. According to Billboard, Louris and Olson decided to sit on the record for so long because they didn't want to distract fans from the musicians recent solo releases, Olson's The Salvation Blues and Louriss Vagabonds, which was also helmed by Robinson.
When asked by AP why Robinson was brought in, Louris said, "We needed a friend who we trusted musically to sit with us, that who we both knew was a fan of both of us, independently and together, and would respect both of us equally and would not lean toward one guy or the other. Chris was the guy, Chris would bring positivity... He just kind of coordinated the whole thing."
Louris also said ego had in no way caused him and Olson to butt heads when recording Ready for the Flood. "I'm willing to play it more by Mark's rules now, and let's do this on a small level and get from it what we get now instead of doing everything and hoping that it will pay off in the future bigger," he said. "We're just going to work in a more small, humble way, and just build it up from there."
And while Louris recently told the Associated Press that musical reunions are generally a bad idea, he said, "We're kind of unusual, we've always been. Hopefully we'll just break the mold. We'll show how maybe when sometimes people get back together they can make music that's as good [or better than] they did in the past, and it's not a shadow of what it was just to make money."
Ready for the Flood was produced by Black Crowes front-man Chris Robinson and recorded in L.A. back in January 2007. According to Billboard, Louris and Olson decided to sit on the record for so long because they didn't want to distract fans from the musicians recent solo releases, Olson's The Salvation Blues and Louriss Vagabonds, which was also helmed by Robinson.
When asked by AP why Robinson was brought in, Louris said, "We needed a friend who we trusted musically to sit with us, that who we both knew was a fan of both of us, independently and together, and would respect both of us equally and would not lean toward one guy or the other. Chris was the guy, Chris would bring positivity... He just kind of coordinated the whole thing."
Louris also said ego had in no way caused him and Olson to butt heads when recording Ready for the Flood. "I'm willing to play it more by Mark's rules now, and let's do this on a small level and get from it what we get now instead of doing everything and hoping that it will pay off in the future bigger," he said. "We're just going to work in a more small, humble way, and just build it up from there."
