Texan songwriter Alex Dupree has been making witty, warm and criminally underrated outsider-folk masterpieces for a couple of decades, both as a solo artist and previously with The Trapdoor Band. Likely to appeal to fans of David Berman, Cass McCombs, Bob Dylan or Townes Van Zandt, he actually sounds very little like any of those people, or like anyone else for that matter. In a career that has seen him move between country twang, softly-strummed folk and soulful confession, his calling card has always been a completely unique eye for lyrical detail. He seems content to exist on the margins, unwilling to compromise, in the lineage of picaresque poet-jester-troubadours that thankfully didn’t end when Michael Hurley died last year.
So it’s fitting that one of the two covers on Talking to the Dog is Hurley’s You’re a Dog, Don’t Talk To Me. Dupree largely eschews the low-fi counter-cultural shenanigans of the original in favour of a more tender delivery and some updated lyrics. In Hurley’s hands, the song is mostly funny. When Dupree sings it, it retains some of that humour, but it’s coated in the same kind of sad, golden sense of wonder that Bill Callahan can achieve. The album’s other cover is perhaps more unexpected: a reworking of Scott Walker’s On Your Own Again, which cleaves surprisingly close to the original in terms of pacing and feel. Shorn of the swooping orchestral accompaniments that Walker favoured, it instead relies on delicate piano and a cunning use of space. It also reveals Dupree as an excellent singer in his own right: the final hushed, wavering note lingering in the deserted night air long after the song has finished.
But if you’re a follower of Dupree’s work, it’s probably his original songs that you’re excited about, and these new ones are amongst his best. I Can See Her In Your Eyes, which features the vocals of The Be Good Tanyas’ founder-member Jolie Holland, is a crepuscular country-jazz duet that plays around with the lyrical tropes of C&W without ever mocking them. Opener New Meaning marries a muscular electric guitar and some forthright piano to themes of vulnerability and rebirth. I Could’ve Been Anyone is ushered in by stately strings and tells a distinctly American tale of longing: a relationship becomes a kind of epic road trip, looked back on from after its end.
The dive bar never seems far away in Dupree’s songs: Stevie’s Fever is a jumpy little country rock number with back-stabs of distorted guitar and shades of honky-tonk (and lyrics that paint an attractively bummed-out picture). Room For One More is a brisk shuffle that moves from William Blake to communism. Imagine if Dylan had got involved with the Band before Highway 61 Revisited was recorded, rather than after: the sessions might have sounded a bit like this.
Zodiac is a real highlight, a kind of lo-fi cosmic country with one foot in the post-summer-of-love comedown and the other in some narcotically altered future. In an album where a sense of place is important, this song seems to combine Dupree’s Texas homeland with the artificially-coloured skies of LA, where so much of America’s strange and strung-out culture was born. But at the same time it seems to hover in a place that is not quite earthly, a beguiling psychic landscape. Voyager Blues goes even further into the ether, creating a kind of space-age psychedelia out of keening strings and admirably minimal (and weirdly funky) guitar licks. Closer, Marseille brings it back down to Earth with an acoustic guitar that has a Leonard Cohen-like simplicity. The lyrics, too, approach Cohen’s level of accomplishment, combining the corporeal with the profoundly spiritual. In fact, you could pick just about any couplet from Talking to the Dog, and it would stand up against the best lyric writing of the last sixty years. Artists less impressive than Alex Dupree are discussed in hushed tones and with cultish reverence; let’s hope he finally gets the credit he deserves.
Talking to the Dog (August 14th, 2026) Scissor Tail Records.