Americana Highways brings you this premiere title track for Jon Spear’s Dusty Streets, due out on August 21. “Dusty Streets and Tumbleweed” is Jon Spear on guitar in a vocal duet with Jennifer Dodge; with pedal steel by Jay Jessup, Jon Spear on mandolin, Andy Burdetsky on bass and John Stubblefield on drums. Dusty Streets was produced, edited, engineered and recorded by Andrew Fritz Waldeck at Ravensworth Studios, Scottsville, VA.
“There’s nothing left of the life that we once dreamed…you left me here alone with broken dreams.” the duo laments, as their vocals rise and intertwine in a tale of love, loss, and metaphorical ghost towns. The mandolin and pedal steel punctuate the flow perfectly on “Dusty Streets.” The album is layer after layer of haunting discovery, as Jon Spear branches out from the blues into Americana on this one.
To get this song written and recorded, I had to overcome five decades of writer’s block. It started out in the 1960s as a poetry experiment, using a moonlit ghost town as a metaphor for lost love. I felt like it had great possibilities, but somehow the lyrics kept wandering off into the deep weeds. Sometimes I let the song sit for years and then would come back to with ideas about different chords and lyrics, but I still wasn’t satisfied. Last year I was with Tommy Emmanuel who made an observation about song-writing that really resonated with me and helped me see where I needed to go with the song. After that breakthrough, it became my highest priority to create a high quality recording that did justice to all the years I spent writing it. So, I was thrilled when Jennifer Dodge agreed to sing a duet with me and Jay Jessup signed up to play pedal steel. They really helped bring the song to life, as did my producer Andy Waldeck. I hope the listeners will agree that all the time and effort that went into creating this song was worth it. — Jon Spear
You can order Dusty Streets right here, http://itunes.apple.com/album/id/1473936154 while you are listening right here: