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Orchestral-pop crooner L.C. Franke announces the release of Southern Bloom, a new series of collaborative singles with the neo-traditional Texas country band Silverada that takes Franke’s urbane jazz stylings on a dusty road trip through the heartland of rural Americana.
The collection kicks off with a reimagining of “Prisoner,” from Franke’s acclaimed debut album Still in Bloom, where the yearning pedal steel, soft-focus keys from Foo Fighters’ Rami Jaffee, and soulful harmonica from Mickey Raphael (Willie Nelson Family Band) conspire to give Franke’s wryly observed tale of amour fou amid the “late nights and bar fights” a newly stirring, Glen Campell-esque sweep.
LISTEN TO “PRISONER”
Southern Bloom was born when 21st-century torch singer L.C. Franke found himself sitting next to Silverada’s Mike Harmeier on a flight to Nashville from their mutual home of Austin, Texas. Franke was headed to play Jack White’s Blue Room at Third Man Records, one of the many high-profile shows booked behind his suave and sophisticated 2024 debut, Still in Bloom. Harmeier was bound for the Grand Ole Opry with his cultishly adored outlaw country group. Over several mini-bottles of tequila, the pair bonded over their mutual love of 1960s country-pop, an era when even the Red Dirt cowboys unabashedly embraced the kind of billowy arrangements and smooth, buttery vocals that color Franke’s own delicately orchestrated music. What if they got together sometime, they joked, and tried on each other’s songs?
A few months later they did just that, with Franke joining Silverada in the studio to trade covers of Franke’s “Prisoner” and Silverada’s “Young in Love,” and roping in a few of Franke’s friends to round things out. Saxophone player Mike Lewis, known for his work with artists like Bon Iver, Andrew Bird, and Bonny Light Horseman, is “one of the most soulful, beautiful horn players I’ve ever heard,” Franke says, “and we've been smitten with each other for a long time.” Rami Jaffee, keyboardist for the Foo Fighters, had likewise been a fan of Franke’s work dating back to when he was performing under the name Jeff Klein. Jaffee’s playing “oozes cool and soul,” Franke says, an accolade that’s especially evident on a cover of Lana Del Rey’s “Say Yes to Heaven” that finds Jaffee’s glistening electric piano gracefully intertwining with Lewis’s sax, the notes curling around each other like tendrils of cigarette smoke drifting eternally toward the heavens.
Arguably, the biggest contributor to the heartworn sound of Southern Bloom comes from Mickey Raphael, a country veteran who’s played with everyone from Emmylou Harris to Ray Charles to U2. “Like Coltrane or Miles, I know within the first three notes when it’s Mickey,” Franke says, and bringing in Raphael’s harmonica — ”the most singular sound in Americana and country music,” Franke says — gives Southern Bloom its distinctive, nightclub-in-the-desert vibe. Bringing Raphael into the L.C. Franke fold also completes a circle that began during the COVID-19 lockdown, when one of Raphael’s recommendations of an old Jimmy Durante album first set Franke on the sentimental journey that led to his eventual vision for Still in Bloom.
Together on Southern Bloom, they obliterate those outmoded divisions separating jazz, pop, country, and soul, distilling them into a timeless sound whose roots run equally wild beneath cracked city sidewalks and the parched Texas plains, growing majestically into branches that touch every corner of great American music.
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