New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Los Angeles-bred "SoCal Country" singer Sam Outlaw will release a pedal steel-stamped, new wave-inspired record titled 'Popular Mechanics' on Friday, November 12th. Solely writing seven of the album's 11 tracks, Outlaw fuses the sounds of his favorite artists of the '80s - Kenny Loggins, Cyndi Lauper,
Tom Petty - with stories influenced by the great innovators of the 20th century and the engineers that make up his own family tree.
The ambitious direction of 'Popular Mechanics' may seem like a sudden shift from Outlaw's country-leaning albums, 'Angeleno' (2015) and 'Tenderheart' (2017), which garnered appearances on CBS Saturday Morning's Anthony Mason, NPR, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal and more, but the gears actually started turning in early 2018 after Outlaw shelved some new material he recorded in Southern California. Following his cross-country move to
Music City that same year, Outlaw found unexpected inspiration during a visit from his father, a mechanical engineer, and it prompted him to shift his focus to the technological side of music creation. The epiphany came when he connected industrial machines with the role technology plays in recorded music. Growing up on the hits of the '80s, an incredible time of transformation in music history, he remembers everything came into focus for the album once he envisioned the title, 'Popular Mechanics.'
"I've always loved '80s music so I started learning about the engineers and music producers from that era, like Trevor Horn, Mutt Lange, Neil Dorfsman," says Outlaw. "It was a time when the producer and the recording engineer were as critical to the creative process as the artists. Those producers pushed the technology to achieve their creative vision because their inspiration was not so much the music of the past, but the possibilities of the future."
Curating this project with vinyl in mind, the first six songs (Side A) transport listeners to the musical bombast of Sunset Avenue in the mid-80s: fretless bass, synthesizers, drum machines and stacked vocals. It features the Petty/Nicks prowl of opening track "Here on a Mission" followed by the New Wave title track "Popular Mechanics," and boasts the exotic allure of "Half a World Away" and romantic "For The Rest of Our Lives" (out now), Side A continues with a reassuring Cyndi Lauper-like "Sun Ain't Set" and standout rocker "Polyamorous" - a song inspired by the true story love triangle that created Wonder Woman in the 1940s.
Side B, on the other hand, features more of the musical aspects that fans have grown to love from Outlaw over the years, yet it immerses the listener further into the rock arena with the power ballad "Stay the Night" and angsty "Bad Enough," which both feature flourishing strings and layered guitars. Quieter tracks "Language of Love" and "
Daydreaming" deliver moments of reflective calm before the closing anthem "When You Feel It," a poignant testimonial to the fire inside.
"Up until now, the music I've made really only shows one side of myself, but I put my whole heart on the line with 'Popular Mechanics,'" Outlaw explains. "I hope listeners will approach this album with open minds because creative expression is, after all, the shared celebration of the creative spirit that lives inside every one of us."
Outlaw has opened for the likes of Kacey Musgraves,
Dwight Yoakam and more, and to tee up the release of 'Popular Mechanics,' he'll perform three back-to-back shows at his own neighborhood bar in East Nashville, The Underdog, on October 7, 8, and 9. Tickets are on-sale now at samoutlaw.com/tour.
'Popular Mechanics' Track List:
1. Here On a Mission (Sam Outlaw)
2. Popular Mechanics (Sam Outlaw, Cheyenne Medders)
3. Half a World Away (Sam Outlaw)
4. For The Rest of Our Lives (Sam Outlaw, Steven Fiore)
5. Sun Ain't Set (Sam Outlaw)
6. Polyamorous (Sam Outlaw)
7. Stay The Night (Sam Outlaw)
8. Bad Enough (Sam Outlaw)
9. Language of Love (Sam Outlaw)
10. Daydreaming (Sam Outlaw, Cheyenne Medders)
11. When You Feel It (Sam Outlaw, Sean Van Vleet).
