Ray Wylie Hubbard

Ray Wylie Hubbard is still making stab-you-in-an-alley-with-a-shiv rock & roll at nearly 80. His latest album, Reel 2 Reel 4 Real, is meant to be played loud. Real loud. It’s not just lean & mean but snarly & downright punchy. Over the course of his career Ray has written boatloads of richly poetic, hold-their-own-in-any-serious-songwriter-circle stunners like “The Messenger,” “Ballad of the Crimson Kings,” “Dust of the Chase,” and “Stone Blind Horses.” But these songs are all for the “Wanna Rock and Roll” set. Out AUG 21, Reel 2 Reel 4 Real marks Ray’s return to his homegrown Bordello Records (distribution by Soundly/Thirty Tigers) after a 2-album joyride on Big Machine Records.

“You know, a lot of artists when they put out a record, they go, ‘This is the best record I’ve done up to this point,’” Hubbard considers sagely after a pause when asked how to best sum up Reel 2 Reel 4 Real, his 20th album in a career stretching back to the mid-70s. “But I’m not going to say this is the best record I’ve done. I’ll say it’s the best record I’ve ever heard.”

“This will probably be my last album,” he says. “I mean I still like writing songs, in fact I’ve got so many damn songs that I don’t know what to do with them, including a really cool one I just wrote with Mike Campbell. But we’re thinking that after putting this album out, we’re just going to throw out singles as I finish them and see what happens.”