The Paranoid Style – Passionate Kisses
This Friday, February 13th, The Paranoid Style will see the release of the band’s fifth LP titled Known Associates, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Bar/None Records.
Today the band makes available a new cover of “Passionate Kisses” originally by Lucinda Williams, an outtake from the band’s recording sessions for the album.
Bandleader Elizabeth Nelson shares: “What does one say about Lucinda Williams? She towers over us like a great Red Oak or the highest wall of the deepest canyon or the brilliant light of a mesmerizing sunset, just after a blazing storm has passed through. I know you shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you, but maybe she’s the exception? Maybe my kicks are her kicks. I know that I just don’t think I ever would have known who I was at all without her. So, we had some studio downtime, and then just started rambling through ‘Passionate Kisses’ like a second martini of three at lunch (which might not have been so far from the truth) and Jason Richmond hit record just in case it got good, which it did. We were listening to the playback in the control room, and my dear buddy and Paranoid Style guitarist William Matheny—a great songwriter of his own accord—put it this way, with just the right, wry touch of awe: ‘You know,’ he said, ‘one day this song didn’t exist, and then it did. How incredible is that?’ How incredible indeed.”
The Paranoid Style also plans to celebrate the album with a RECORD RELEASE SHOW in Washington, D.C. on February 27th at Comet Ping Pong with support from Dot Dash.
The Paranoid Style’s bandleader Elizabeth Nelson is also a decorated journalist, who can now add podcast host to her resume with the recently launched Known Associates podcast, presented by New Pony in affiliation with Southwest Review. On the Known Associates pod, Nelson talks to other singers and writers about their lives and art. The first four episodes are available now and feature guests Craig Finn from the Hold Steady, Patterson Hood from Drive-By Truckers, and “music writer, director and producer, author and feminist badass” Jessica Hopper, and “feminist, writer, editor, and beloved NPR correspondent” Ann Powers.
The Paranoid Style finished up 2025 with a notable appearance on NPR + Prairie Public Radio’s Great American Folk Show, featuring a performance of the previously unavailable song “Still Creepy After All These Years” and had a revelatory discussion on the Kreative Kontrol podcast with Nelson detailing her experience penning the liner notes for The Replacements’ Let It Be (Deluxe Edition), which currently appear in full care of GQ. 2025 also saw Elizabeth Nelson receive a special recognition from ASCAP for her liner notes “Hours in the Colosseum: Notes on the 1974 Tour” from The 1974 Live Recordings by Bob Dylan & The Band.
“Elegant Bachelors” finds bandleader Elizabeth Nelson observing nostalgia of a bygone era that may or may not have existed in the way it’s remembered, singing “On a hillside, by the abandoned old barn/ You can still weave a tale, you can still spin a yarn/ You can still see the shadows incarcerate the day/ Elegant Bachelors having their way.”
Nelson explains: “I wrote it about Don Henley, or anyway my idea of who Don Henley might be behind all of the swagger. In some ways he is the saddest and most clear eyed observer of his own generation. ‘Boys of Summer’ is brutally lacerating, an isolated loser issuing a bitter critique to a former flame and a former way of life, only to desperately want to relive the fraudulent affair again. It’s a perfect song, and no one else can play that tune. Springsteen would have somehow made it feel aspirational. Neil Young would have sounded sarcastic. Henley lays into every line with the coked-out fury of your average ‘80s Wall Street tycoon: the first spasms of the angry investor class. Buckle up.”
The wry, rollicking, anthemic rocker “White Wine Whatever,” is an ode to contemporary malaise and cognitive dissonance, which Elizabeth Nelson calls: “A favorite Paranoid Style track of mine,” adding: “…Though recorded under a dark cloud of inter-band mystery that day—Tim was pissed at Jon, which is common enough, but even William and Peter and the typically unflappable Mike V. seemed on edge. Of course I hadn’t slept the night before, or any of the recent nights, finishing the songs and all. We were maniacs. This thing is just a pure fucking brawl. By the time Eugene Edwards—Dwight Yoakam’s lead guitarist—laid in a series of intensely greasy licks, Matt Douglas of the Mountain Goats had jumped in too, on sax, it was the closest thing to Mick Taylor and Bobby Keys I’ve heard since ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.’ If nothing else, tune in for that. My fingers are still sticky.”
“It’s a Dog’s Breakfast (for LR),” is a song Elizabeth Nelson wrote for Linda Ronstadt that accompanied the album’s announcement in October, sharing: “Ronstadt the interpreter is so wild. From Mike Nesmith to Roy Orbison to Elvis Costello, she always amplified and extended, making it possible to hear those things in a song that had previously been just out of reach. THAT is what it means to be an interpreter, just as Sarah Vaughan could take Cole Porter to unimaginable places. But how to reimagine the already astonishing and bawdy Stones classic ‘Tumbling Dice’ is yet another question. Maybe that’s why she changed the lyrics and made them simultaneously more shocking and yet more relatable to women everywhere. So, I wrote this song for Linda Ronstadt, whom I love so much.”
“Tearing the Ticket” pays tribute to lost DC-area music legends Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan, and wrestles with the ghosts of the past amidst a flickering future. One part funeral march and one part valedictory commitment to carry on, “Tearing the Ticket” features Matt Douglas, the multi-instrumentalist from the Mountain Goats, who provides keening saxophone and flute for the Springsteen-meets-X-Ray-Spex examination of a hard, long life lived in music, which is dedicated to Bar/None’s recently deceased and terribly missed longtime label manager Mark Lipsitz.
Elizabeth Nelson’s usual Paranoid Style lineup of Peter Holsapple, William Matheny, Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, Jon Langmead and Timothy Bracy all play on Known Associates, the exhilarating follow up to 2024’s ten-alarm panic attack The Interrogator which saw acclaim from NPR/WHYY’s Fresh Air, Pitchfork, Brooklyn Vegan, Relix, FLOOD, and The Vinyl District among others upon its release. Along with the aforementioned Matt Douglas, Known Associates also includes notable appearances from Eugene Edwards, a Danny Gatton disciple who is Dwight Yoakam’s lead guitarist, and Lisa Walker from Wussy.
A fever dream of Van Morrison-horns and Leonard Cohen sentiments, Known Associates is the LP which ratifies the steadily rising reputation of Elizabeth Nelson as one of our insurgently crucial songwriters. Like her longtime hero Lucinda Williams, Nelson’s slow burn has run side by side with an ever-growing literary reputation, which has seen her work as an acclaimed contributor to the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker and Oxford American, as well as writing liner notes for reissues by Bob Dylan and the Replacements.
Regal, ragtag and filled with the sort of hard luck stories, busted-up epiphanies and thriftstore miracles that will be familiar to any fan of Richard Thompson, David Berman or Tom Waits, the mystics and statistics are already saying it: Known Associates is one of the greatest records of 2026, and Elizabeth Nelson is one of the best singer-songwriters in the world.
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