Photo: Ian McFarlane
Grammy Nominated Songwriter Randall Bramblett To Release New Album ‘Paradise Breakdown’
Multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter Randall Bramblett is pleased to announce the forthcoming release of his new album, Paradise Breakdown, due Sept 27th via Strolling Bones Records, shares the new funky, horn-filled new single “Throw My Cane Away.”
For decades, Bramblett explored the deep corners and outer orbits of American roots music, creating a southern sound that’s every bit as eclectic as its maker. That sound reaches a new milestone with Paradise Breakdown, the thirteenth record from a musician hailed as “one of the South’s most lyrical and literate songwriters” by Rolling Stone. The album finds Bramblett taking stock of past and present, embracing all the contradictory elements — love and loss; joy and disappointment; nostalgia and mortality — of a career dedicated to creation.
“Throw My Cane Away”
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Bramblett captures that paradox with tracks like the album’s sunlit opener, “Fire Down in Our Souls” — a funky love song rooted in groove and grit, its chorus stacked with soulful vocal harmonies — and the mean, murky “Down in the Wilderness.” “That’s my kind of song: deep and dark,” he says of the latter recording, which makes room for ghostly electric guitar, atmospheric chords, and a tense pulse. Things get psychedelic during the song’s bridge, where Bramblett’s upright piano leads the way into outer space. At its core, though, this is earthbound music — the kind of electrified soul-funk and dive-bar R&B that feels raw and broken-in, rooted in the storytelling chops of a man who’s spent much of the past half-century in the recording studio and on the road/
Paradise Breakdown proves that Bramblett has plenty of material for his own projects, too. Teaming up with legendary instrumentalists like Tom Bukovac, Steve Mackey, Nick Johnson and producer/drummer Gerry Hansen, he cooked up up his own melting pot of urban swamp-soul and modern roots music in an East Nashville studio. Once those sessions wrapped up, he headed back to his adopted hometown of Athens, Georgia — a four-hour drive from his birthplace of Jesup — to finish the record with familiar partners like Seth Hendershot, A.J. Adams, Tom Ryan and Nick Johnson. The result is a mix of organic performances and electronic textures: an album built for roadhouse dance floors, dark lonely corners, and the long ride from past to present.
Bramblett plays keyboards, keyboards, saxophones, flute, guitar, mandolin, and harmonica.
Bramblett tracked half of the album in East Nashville, a town he’d been coming to the city for decades, not only to play his own shows, but to record some of his own earlier albums for New West Records. Along the way, many reputable artists have recorded his songs. Bonnie Raitt opened her Grammy-winning album Slipstream with his composition “Used to Rule the World” in 2012. The Blind Boys of Alabama covered his song “Almost Home” on their own Grammy-nominated record several years later. Blues legend Bettye LaVette took things a step further, recording 11 different Bramblett compositions on her 2024 Grammy-nominated record LaVette! dubbing him “the best writer that I have heard in the last 30 years.”
Bramblett is one of the unsung heroes of modern-day American music, composing his own albums one minute and playing a supportive role in the careers of other musicians — including Steve Winwood, Widespread Panic, Chuck Leavell, and Marc Cohn, all of whom have cherry-picked Bramblett to be a member of their touring bands. Listen to his voice, a gravelly baritone that can bend its way around melodies like well-worn leather, and you can hear the evidence of a half-century’s worth of shows, from acoustic performances to amplified, full-band gigs.
Paradise Breakdown offers more than the soulful, sobering reflections of a road warrior who’s willing to look at the blacktop stretching out behind him, though; it’s also a snapshot of a man still in motion.
Randall Bramblett website
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