Sarah Lee Langford and Will Stewart - Bad Luck & Love (2022)

Here is the sound of momentum: Sarah Lee Langford and Will Stewart roving together through the oldest tropes of country music and every other genre. Here find rugged landscapes, whiskey barrooms, the same old bad luck and love. And yet the nine-song romp delivers a hundred fresh takes.

Langford and Stewart are frequent collaborators. They perform here with friends Keelan Parrish (Vulture Whale), Brian Gosdin (Dexateens), and Ford Boswell (Early James), as well as on Langford's previous LP Two-Hearted Rounder (Cornelius Chapel Records). But that album came out in 2019, back when we all lived on another planet. Their latest full-length release together Bad Luck & Love resonates with all that we've survived.

These are Birmingham, Alabama's hymns to the hard work of getting by, in relationship and on stage. If exploration is a theme of Bad Luck & Love, the pedal steel that makes the record so red-dirt earthy ends by taking us to outer space. "I thank my lucky stars 'cause I think stars are lucky / Plus we're spinning around in space, no place to lay our heads."