Alex Dupree returns on August 14th with Talking to the Dog, his first album since 2022’s Thieves, released via Oklahoma’s Scissor Tail Records who also delivered us some excellent releases from Matt Kivel, Joseph Allred and, of course, Dylan Golden Aycock, who founded the label in 2010. Ahead of it’s August release, Dupree has today shared the opening track, New Meaning.
New Meaning was the first song Dupree cut in Los Angeles, and it set the tone for the sessions. What you hear is a live take, the band finding the song across its three minutes — the kind of spontaneity Dupree wanted throughout. “Songs don’t often reach me fully formed, but this one did,” he says. “I sensed the whole shape of it right away: bright and brassy and Big Star-ish. It had the tumbling feeling of coins spilling out of a slot machine.” The lyric works its way up to a “come all ye” folk refrain: “people gather round, I got new meaning.”
The album title comes from a line Hank Williams once gave a radio interviewer — that writing a song is just talking to the dog. Dupree, a published poet as much as a songwriter, takes the throwaway remark somewhere stranger and more visionary. The album was produced by Michael Krassner (Califone, Simon Joyner), who also worked on Thieves, and, among the guests, are Jolie Holland.
Matt Kivel, who wrote the album’s notes, calls it a mid-career masterpiece and reckons Dupree now stands alongside the likes of Cass McCombs and Will Oldham. Elsewhere on the record, Dupree reworks Scott Walker’s On Your Own Again and a Michael Hurley rarity, You’re a Dog, Don’t Talk to Me, the latter rebuilt with new lyrics of his own.
When KLOF covered Thieves, Bob Fish wrote that really listening to Dupree “reveals tales worthy of a novelist, yet what takes them 200 pages, he does in less than five minutes.” Talking to the Dog sounds like it widens the frame.
Talking to the Dog (August 14th, 2026) Scissor Tail Records
Pre-Order (Digital, Ltd Vinyl): https://alexdupree.bandcamp.com/album/talking-to-the-dog
