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Dec 01, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by Dustin Aksland

Grandaddy are releasing a new album, Blu Wav, on February 16, 2024 via Dangerbird. Now they have shared a new song from it, “Cabin in My Mind,” via a music video. Aaron Beckum directed the video. Watch it below.

Grandaddy’s frontman Jason Lytle had this to say about “Cabin in My Mind” in a press release: “A while back I was traveling with a friend, doing some shows and just riffing, and he came up with this phrase. It made so much sense to me and had so many things just within the title itself: shutting off and just, like, going inward. It’s fun to imagine literally a cabin inside your mind. ‘I’m out of here, see ya, guys’ and you walk in the front door, shut the door and disappear for a while.’ It was perfect like an old country song where the title says everything. I remembered the phrase, and it was easy for me to pick it up and just make it work.”

When the album was announced, Grandaddy shared its first single, “Watercooler,” via a music video. “Watercooler” was one of our Songs of the Week.

The album’s title Blu Wav is a mash-up of “bluegrass” and “New Wave,” as the new album tries to combine the lyrics associated with bluegrass waltz’s with the synthesizers and electronic sounds of ’80s New Wave, with the latter being more in Grandaddy’s wheelhouse. This came about when Lytle discovered a classic country radio station while driving through the Nevada desert and heard Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” and wondered what it sound like in more of a Grandaddy style. “There’s an inordinate amount of pedal steel [on the new album],” says Lytle.

In 2017 Grandaddy released their comeback album, Last Place, which was their first album in 11 years, since 2006’s Just Like the Fambly Cat. Blu Wav is their first new album since Last Place, but they’ve been busy with archival releases since then.

Earlier this year they released Sumday Twunny, a 20th anniversary box set reissue of their 2003 album, Sumday, which included Sumday: The Cassette Demos and Sumday: Excess Baggage, a 13-song collection of rarities and B-Sides that was also released separately.

In 2020, Grandaddy released a 20th anniversary reissue of The Sophtware Slump, which included a solo piano version of the album played by Lytle.

Grandaddy were on the cover of Under the Radar’s very first print issue, in 2001, in which we interviewed them about The Sophtware Slump.

Grandaddy also features Aaron Burtch, Jim Fairchild, and Tim Dryden. The band’s Kevin Garcia passed away in 2017.

Read our 2017 interview with Grandaddy about Last Place.

Grandaddy also contributed to our Covers of Covers 20th anniversary album, where they covered Metric’s “Blindness.”

We also interviewed Grandaddy for our 20th Anniversary Issue and you can read that article here.

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