Matt York: It's a really organic story. In 2023, I was performing at City Winery in Nashville, performing the songs of the Highwaymen and talking about a book I'd written about them. I was invited to perform on NBC's local morning TV show there, Today in Nashville, to talk about the book and the gig. I'd done that show in the past doing my own music and knew it was a great way to reach an audience. The night before the taping of the show, I found out I couldn't perform any songs that were written by the Highwaymen because it was network television, and I didn't have written permission from the artists. I know that songs over a hundred years old went into the public domain, so I ended up performing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" (link here). I then went down this rabbit hole of listening to Johnny Cash and Willie's gospel records and fell in love with the songs and the spirit of the songs. I noticed when I'd perform concerts and sneak in 1-2 of those songs, people really responded to them. I kept playing them at gigs and in church. About 1 1/2 years ago, I met my girlfriend who is an incredible fiddle player and we loved playing a lot of these songs.

Matt: Taylor Hollingsworth had played guitar on my last album, Gently Used, five years ago. He'd recorded his album at Dialback, and I'd been a big fan of his music as well as Matt Patton's bands the Drive-By Truckers and Dexateens. He connected me to Matt Patton. I loved the warmth of the songs I heard coming out of there and also loved the idea of traveling south to record them in an iconic studio with so much history. It was a really, really wonderful experience.

Matt: For the most part, Burns, Angel and I were isolated in three separate rooms and played live. There were some added overdubs of fiddle, keys and harmonies after the fact. Matt Patton came in and banged out the bass parts all at once after we had the skeleton of the songs in place. There's so many great instruments/equipment in that studio to choose from, so we tried out a bunch of different things. The whole album was done in four days. Starlin Browning worked his magic behind the board with the mixing, engineering and producing. It was a very laid back vibe. Burns, Matt Patton and Angel are all such incredible players, that it was an embarrassment of riches when we were deciding what to add/what to pull out. At its core though, I think the album is about the songs.

Matt: It does have a special meaning. I was in the midst of a divorce a while back, and was playing gigs every day with no let up. I was doing a ton of driving and I had kidney stones. I didn't know I had them though (until they passed), I thought it was stress and that maybe I'd thrown my back out. I needed to make money, so I needed to gig and I was driving around the hills of New England barely able to breathe from the pain I was in. The Happy Goodmans' version of that song was just something that really was a salve to me at the time.

Matt: Thank you for saying that. I'd fallen in love with gospel music and wanted to hear some live gospel music. I'd grown up Catholic (but didn't spend much time in church). I Googled "great gospel music in Massachusetts churches" and the Fourth Presbyterian Church in South Boston popped up first. Life was hard at the time, and I knew I needed to find a community to help me mend. The music there was electric. Burns Stanfield, who plays on the album, has been the pastor of that church for 30+ years and I started showing up on Sundays and playing in the choir. When I met my girlfriend, Angel, I brought her there. She plays fiddle each week there as well. We're now both members of the church and look forward to Sunday mornings all week long.

Matt: I started playing the clubs of Boston as a teenager playing indie rock songs that I wrote. I was the guitarist/vocalist/songwriter for a band called Wide Iris in the 1990's that got to do some really cool stuff and play some really great rooms back then. I took a lot of time off when I was married and had young kids. The Boston, Texas record was an album I wrote for my dad in 2016. I didn't plan on doing music again, but I got the itch and I started playing tons of gigs doing originals. That's all I'd ever done. I'd perform down south at times, and I felt like a lot of my musical heroes were being forgotten with time. I wrote a book about the Highwaymen and people seemed to like it, so I started receiving a lot of cultural council grants in MA to talk about the book and perform the songs of these guys, and it just kinda took off. At the same time, the great indie clubs/bars started closing very quickly after COVID, so there just weren't enough places to play originals. I still play gigs doing originals, but I make money doing the Highwaymen/Willie concerts. I honestly don't have a preference. I play to a lot of older audiences nowadays, which was something I'd never done before. I'm 54 now, so the late night bar gigs are less appealing nowadays, but I love playing music for anybody that's interested in listening. There are days when I play concerts for groups of people with traumatic brain injuries or people with Alzheimer's Disease and then later that night, I'm opening up for some great touring band from Nashville or Austin and playing my own songs. It's always different.

Matt: I left music around 2001 and started working in the corporate world. I was laid off during the early part of COVID and, simultaneously, my former wife was laid off. We had two young kids and were really scrambling. I'd always hated my job, but it had good benefits, a steady paycheck, etc., but I knew I couldn't go back to that world. I started doing the songs of the Highwaymen at community concerts, and the reception for those concerts was consistently good, so I knew I was on to something. After a while, I knew that there was nothing else I wanted to do. I'm not an impersonator; I sing these songs from my own voice. The Mississippi record is just an extension of what I began doing solo with these guys' songs. The live feel of this record sounds very similar to what you'd hear at our church on Sundays.

Matt: I've written a book about the Highwaymen and a book about Willie Nelson. They are a collection of stories I've picked up along the way, and each chapter is pretty short. There's some anecdotes about people I've come across doing this music thing that I do. I anticipate working on a new book this fall that delves into what makes music so meaningful to people. I meet so many people for whom music is such an important part of their lives.

Matt: Some of my favorite artists are Jonny Fritz, Chris Acker, Sierra Ferrell and Silverada. I love the spirit of their music. You can hear the influence of some classic country artists, but I love how they put their own spin on it. When I started doing music again in 2016, it was hard to find much traditional sounding country music. I'm not a fan of modern country music at all, so it's been exciting to see artists like Tyler Childers, Chris Stapleton and Sturgull Simpson find ways to sell a ton of records and fill huge arenas playing music that folks like Waylon Jennings would have loved to listen to. I hope that leads to a bunch of new artists continuing to grow that trend.

Matt: I'm just gigging nonstop. I hope to bring this gospel record to lots of churches across the country in the coming months/years. What I try to do each week is perform concerts that hopefully make people feel something. Whether those songs trigger memories from their past, or make them laugh or cry, I want them to get lost in the concert and forget about their worries for a bit. I'm no religious scholar. I show up on Sundays to church and try to listen and learn, but I love performing these gospel songs to audiences as well.