“I like original music. I like to listen to people who are playing themselves, not somebody else or who they think they should be. I like a raw truth. I like to celebrate the hilarity of life. The whole deal. The boogie woogie, the bebop and the blues as well as folk music of all nations.” –Michael Hurley in an interview with Psychedelic Baby Magazine in 2021
“Hurley was a modern master of the sideways drift in terms of both lifestyle and musical composition… Broken Homes And Gardens is not his best record, but it is an absolutely pure statement of where he was at for the last few years, and is a sheer pleasure to hear.” – Byron Coley in The Wire.
Michael Hurley passed away in April of this year. He was 83 years old (read this touching obituary at NPR). Hurley made dozens of albums since his debut, First Songs, on the Folkways label in 1964. Not long before Hurley’s passing, our pals at No Quarter–Hurley’s record label home since 2021–reached out to us about a new album that he’d just finished. They wanted to know if we’d be interested in picking the album for our Record of the Month Club. We listened to the album via a private link, loved what we heard, and responded with our resounding YES! Michael was even going to sign the records for us at his home in rural Oregon.
We were so bummed to hear of Michael’s passing in April, but we are so glad he left us with one more album of fresh material.
Broken Homes and Gardens was completed in March 2025 just before Hurley left for his final shows in Asheville and Knoxville. He had been working on these 11 tracks for the past three years at The Rope Room studio in Astoria, Oregon with the same crew as his 2021 LP The Time of the Foxgloves. As was common with Hurley LP’s: there are re-workings of older compositions (“Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls”, “Abomidable Snowman”) alongside new songs (“Fava”, “The Monkey”) making for a brilliant final collection, and capping off one of the most consequential bodies of work of any American songwriter.
ROTM Club members will be getting a copy of the LP, which will ship the last week of August.
Check out In Sheep’s Clothing’s post “Michael Hurley in 5 Songs: Portrait of an American Original.”
