When Grammy winner Dave Alvin and Grammy nominee Jimmie Dale Gilmore made the album Downey To Lubbock together in 2018, they wrote the title track as a sort of mission statement. “I know someday this old highway’s gonna come to an end,” Alvin sings near the song’s conclusion. Gilmore answers: “But I know when it does you’re going to be my friend.” Six years later, they’re serving notice that the old highway hasn’t ended yet. “We’re still standing, no matter what you might hear,” they sing on “We’re Still Here,” the final track to their new album TexiCali. Due out June 21 on Yep Roc Records, TexiCali continues to bridge the distance between the two troubadours’ respective home bases of California (Alvin) and Texas (Gilmore). The geographic theme reflects Alvin’s repeated journeys to record in Central Texas with Gilmore and the Austin-based backing band that has toured with the duo for the past few years. As Alvin puts it in the liner notes, those road trips informed the music they made on TexiCali: From one part of the borderland to another, through concrete swaths of traffic, tract homes and shopping malls, across vast rocky deserts of Joshua trees, saguaros and ocotillo, speeding by forgotten battlefields, remote mining towns, corrido barrooms, cinder block churches and abandoned houses filled with abandoned dreams, past Mission San Xavier del Bac, Cochise’s Stronghold and Apache Pass, into the shimmering lights of El Paso/Juarez before the seemingly eternal emptiness of West Texas, traveling those 1,400 miles somewhere between Nothingness and Everything.

Brennen Leigh is an American songwriter, guitar player, mandolin player and singer whose to-the-point storytelling style has elevated her to cult icon status in Europe, Scandinavia, across the United States, South America and the United Kingdom. Her songs have been recorded by Lee Ann Womack, Rodney Crowell, Sunny Sweeney, Charley Crockett, and many others. As renowned for her musicianship as for her writing, it’s easy to see how Leigh caught the ear of greats like Guy Clark, who colorfully endorsed her flatpicking. And David Olney, who described her writing as “tender, violent, sentimental, foolish and wise, she is always Brennen. Confident and at ease with herself, without being a jerk about it.”