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May 26, 2026 By Caleb Campbell

Athens, Georgia-based indie singer/songwriter Adam Klein has spent the last two decades making thoughtful and poetic folk rock, including a recent foray into politically-charged meditations with his most recent full-length album, 2023’s Holidays in United States. After a quiet handful of years, Klein returned earlier this spring with a new live album, Live at Leesta Vall Sound Recordings, a collection of old favorites and unreleased efforts, all recorded live in-studio. Klein first recorded the album in 2019 while on tour, stripping his sound back to the barest essentials in a single marathon session alongside Athens violinist Adam Poulin.

The resulting efforts initially lived exclusively on vinyl, but after Leesta Vall closed in 2025, Klein reached out for permission to release the album digitally. The full album is out now, and today Klein is following the release with an accompanying live video for one of the session’s highlights, “To The Birds,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“To The Birds” is the opening track to Klein’s 2019 record, Low Flyin’ Planes, and is a soft-spun, gently reflective offering, unfurling with spacious expanses of instrumentation and winding pedal steel. The live version of the track strips it back even further, trading in moments of layered orchestration and replacing them with Klein’s guitar and Poulin’s violin, recorded live and with no overdubs. Even more than before, the results feel like a gorgeously warm expression of early-morning folk intimacy, leaning into the solitary bent of the lyrics: “I’m rich in certain things / Can’t put your finger on / Now my prime is passin’ by / Memories are nearly gone / I’m playin to the birds at the window side / Will satisfaction ever find me? / Playing to the birds at the window side.”

Klein says of the track and video, “I wrote ‘To the Birds’ about a decade ago after having been off the road for a while, working random jobs and generally hustling for an income. I was missing both the excitement and stimulation of travel and the time and space to slow down and orient myself toward songwriting and other creative efforts. I wanted to be surprised and energized by new experiences. So the song longs for this sort of movement, growth, and relevance. I wasn’t playing many shows at the time and would find myself picking up the guitar, looking out my living room window, and strumming around, watching the squirrels and birds perched on the trees.

It ended up being the first track on my 2019 album Low Flyin’ Planes, with lush pedal steel and harmony-laced orchestration produced by my longtime collaborator Bronson Tew. Here it’s stripped back a touch with just acoustic guitar, vocals, and Adam Poulin’s tasteful and understated violin playing. Our good friend Jeff Shipman, an Atlanta-based filmmaker and photographer, shot footage of this performance during our direct-to-vinyl session at the now-defunct Leesta Vall Sound Studios in Brooklyn, and he filmed and edited the video.”

Check out the song and video below. Live at Leesta Vall Sound Recordings is out now everywhere digitally.