Peabody and Annie Awards–winning songwriter ALEXIS HARTE built his new album Thirsty from the ground up — dirt, rust and roots first. Roughly 30 tracks emerged and were whittled down to these 11 songs, sculpted to evoke times when life feels like it’s practically disintegrating, but really rewarding us with some hard-earned wisdom. The album, Harte’s seventh, is an unflinching journal through a gauntlet of transformative events over the last handful of years: an out-of-the-blue heart attack on the studio floor; a mother’s near-drowning, decline, and passing from Parkinson’s; a wife’s breast cancer; a global pandemic; the rise of homegrown fascism; and watching California dry out and burn.
Yet amid the weight, Thirsty captures deep moments of joy — finding beauty in the mundane (“Spent Sunday”), a graceful resignation to aging (“Old Volkswagen,” “All the Hard Work”), and learning to forgive and seek forgiveness (“Partner”). These songs came to Harte as uninvited houseguests: an infectious rhythm loops endlessly, a melody hums from seemingly nowhere, stories paint themselves on the walls. Thirsty is the guestbook — notes from the songs that took up residency — now they’ve moved on to you. For 12 years, Harte was co-founder and creative director of the multiple award-winning Pollen Music Group. He wrote “No Wrong Way Home,” which anchored the Oscar-nominated and Emmy–winning animated film Pearl (Patrick Osborne, Dir.). Before co-founding Pollen, Harte was signed to a multi-year Lionsgate publishing deal and placed dozens of songs in film and TV. As a performer, he has shared bills with Taj Mahal, Cat Power, Dar Williams, Fantastic Negrito, and many of his hometown friends.
