LUKE ROBERTS ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM 'SUNLIT CROSS,' OUT 14TH OCTOBER

This 14th October sees the release of Sunlit Cross, the unwaveringly honest and raw new album from Nashville-based Luke Roberts. The music made by Roberts is wide in scope and spare in structure. It is as universal as it is poetically personal – if you have to truly label it, the right stamp to put on it might be “redemptive blues.”

Sunlit Cross was recorded at Ronniejone$ound with Kyle Spence (who, in addition to recording tracks for Kurt Vile’s B’lieve I’m Goin Down, also drums with Vile and Harvey Milk). Spence and Roberts worked extensively on arrangements and instrumentation resulting in the most sonically rich record of Roberts’ career. Kurt Vile, with whom Luke had toured, added backing vocals and banjo on the track “Silver Chain.” In addition to Vile, other collaborators include John Neff (Drive-By Truckers) on pedal steel and Creston Spiers (Harvey Milk) on viola, guitar, and piano.

Watch the Dillon Hayes-directed music video for debut single, “Silver Chain,” which presents the essence of Sunlit Cross and Luke Roberts’ inherent desire to look past the dark truths to see a real light.

Working in such a bucolic environment, the Georgia pines, birds and crickets echoing all around, suited Roberts. “It feels like you’re in a billionaire’s office in a treehouse,” Roberts says, “making music with some real pros.”
Luke Roberts has long searched for freedom - even as a kid growing up in East Nashville, he began train-hopping, exploring who he was and where he should be in the world. Four years after the release of his second album, "The Iron Gates at Throop and Newport," Roberts has gone from living in a trailer in Montana to living on acreage in Tennessee, where he is learning how to farm. In the passing years, Roberts dealt with true heartbreak and wanderlust, driving between New York and Nashville, living out of his car for weeks, traveling to Cambodia and Thailand and finally to Kenya, where he stayed with a family whose day-to-day challenges and simple  needs  impressed him and put his own life into perspective. It was in Kenya where the songs on Sunlit Cross originated. The record is a lullaby, Roberts says, one that pits darkness and disenchantment and the ugly side of life against levity, love, and childhood.

   Luke Roberts - "Sunlit Cross"
Out 14th October via Thrill Jockey  Available on LP / CD / DL

Track listing:
1. Song To Remember
2. American Music
3. Run
4. Virginia Girl
5. Nursery Rhyme
6. Silver Chain
7. Untitled Blues
8. Missing Blues
9. Many Miles
10. Big Chief Cole