Grey DeLisle – The Grey Album
GRAMMY-winning singer/songwriter Grey DeLisle announces her forthcoming LP, The Grey Album, with a single called “40 Something Runaway” which features Cherie Currie, the lead singer of legendary band The Runaways!
The album is out on April 4th via Hummin’bird Records.
Grey DeLisle turns out songs the way Stephen King turns out novels. The way Ryan Adams creates covers. The way Krispy Kreme delivers donuts. Sweet and satisfying, and staggering in sheer volume. “Prolific” doesn’t even begin to cut it.
One might be shocked to learn that she once endured a long songwriting dry spell after a bout of crippling stage fright, turning her focus on forging a brilliant career as one of Hollywood’s top voice actors (The Simpsons, Scooby-Doo, Spongebob Squarepants, and more) and being the mom of three children. In the isolation of 2020, the spark came back, and she began writing feverishly. The songs were coming so fast that she decided to record them with her longtime creative partner, Murry Hammond of Old 97’s, with whom she has collaborated for over two decades on countless musical projects (and one human being, their son, wunderkind visual artist Tex Hammond).
Using Hammond’s full complement of vintage recording equipment, the pair racked up the songs and played them for producer and longtime collaborator Marvin Etzioni. Etzioni produced DeLisle’s first solo record, The Small Time, in 2000, and introduced her to some of the stellar musicians the pair still work with to this day. The artists on The Grey Album are a Who’s Who of Americana and roots rock: strings by Tammy Rogers (Emmylou Harris, Neil Diamond, Patty Loveless), horns by David Ralicke (Lucinda Williams, Beck, Morrissey, John Cale), pedal steel by Greg Leisz (basically every major American artist who has ever used pedal steel).
The best part is, that they all separately contributed their parts in the coolest game of relay ever: after the original analog recordings were digitally mastered by renowned sound engineer Todd Burke (Ben Harper, Albert Hammond Jr., Belle and Sebastian), DeLisle would send the tracks off to Rogers, who laid down the heavenly strings, passed it on to Leisz for the pedal steel magic, then on to Ralicke for horns.
Along the way, DeLisle kept writing more and more songs, and meeting more and more artists with whom she just had to collaborate. At a dinner party, DeLisle was seated next to the Runaways’ Cherie Currie, which she took as a sign as she had written album track “40 Something Runaway” that same morning. Would Currie like to sing on it? She sure would! This kind of serendipity seems to follow DeLisle everywhere she goes. Stephen McCarthy (Long Ryders, Jayhawks) came on board for “Didn’t We Try,” and Etzioni lent his song “Convince Me” to the tracklist, one he originally wrote for Roy Orbison before his sudden death in 1988.
Over the course of five years, DeLisle weaved together these collaborative threads to form the tapestry of The Grey Album. The record is imbued with all of the Americana artistry of the many hands that brought it to life, delivered in the inimitable style of Grey DeLisle.
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