Americana renaissance man Jim Lauderdale has announced details of a new album ‘Game Changer’—his 35th full-length album—which features his new single ‘That Kind Of Life (That Kind Of Day),’ a rollicking ode to what Jim calls “the sentiment and wishes for others to have a good life” which you can listen to below. Lauderdale had the instrumental twin guitar/steel hook in his head when he sat down to write the song. “For some reason, the first line—‘When a baby tastes a little bit of sunshine, hits their legs kicks and bounces up and down, Grins and laughs and everything is so fine, We wanna keep em’ that way for a while’—just tumbled out, I wasn’t really sure where it was going but that image popped into my head and I went with it,” he says. The rest of the verses followed and Lauderdale topped it all off with a call-to-action of sorts in the chorus. The resulting tune is a breezy, windows-down country journey, willing listeners to have that kind of feeling “Where things will go a little more their way.”
Operating under his own label, Sky Crunch Records, for the first time since 2016, Lauderdale recorded the new album at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, co-producing the release with Jay Weaver and pulling from songs he’d written over the last several years. “There’s a mixture on this record of uplifting songs and, at the same time, songs of heartbreak and despair—because that’s part of life as well,” he says. “In the country song world especially, that’s always been part of it. That’s real life.”
“Country music is constantly evolving, but I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for steel guitar and a Telecaster,” he says. “I have done my job on this record if people who love classic country feel like they can put it on, or have it in their collection, and it would fit right in.”
Track on the new album include ‘We’re All We’ve Got,’ a co-write with Mary Gauthier and Jaimee Harris, a message about healing torn relationships at home and across the world. And ‘Friends Again,’ a grinning number about rekindling a friendship. “When everything works right, it’s just magical to be able to hear them back,” he says. “You feel, at least for those three-and-a-half minutes, like life makes sense.”
In addition to the news of Lauderdale’s new album, he’s also just been named a 2022 nominee for the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Lauderdale, along with eleven other of his contemporaries, will be celebrated at the Songwriters Hall of Fame Gala in October where the Class of 2022 Hall of Fame inductees will be announced.
