This Frontier Needs Heroes – Homage To Catalonia (Limited edition of 8 copies)- LP (Preorder)

Track Listing

*Preorder of the limited-edition version of 8 copies. The record’s recipient will receive a unique hand-painted and numbered cover made from 1 of 8 pieces of a giant painting done by Luigi Falagario.*

Cadaques Cowboy
Homage To Catalonia
Take All The Time You Need
Significant Other
Ten Bullets In The Back
Carolina Peaches
Truck Driver
Not Gonna Write A Song

Notes

The last three This Frontier Needs Heroes records have unwound like a trilogy about living inside chaos. Real Job
reported from inside the early Trump years, direct and unhappy about it. Go With the Flow tried to accept it and stay
happy anyway. Now Homage to Catalonia, Bradley Lauretti’s sixth studio album, is what happens after you leave —
and the discovery that our problems don’t disappear. They just change shape.
Bradley was living between Nashville, NYC, and Miami, sorting out Italian citizenship, when COVID slammed the
border shut. He eventually made it to Barcelona, where he’s now been living for four years — longer than anywhere
since he left New York, but the record refuses a happy ending. “I don’t think you can fully leave America or fully arrive
in Catalonia,” he says. “Arriving in Catalonia is a work in progress, and so is America.”
The title admits his outsider status: “I know I’ll never feel Catalonia the way a Catalan feels and breathes its history.”
The title track was written on a friend’s balcony watching pensioners protest every Monday, singing an old Catalan
folk melody — Lauretti borrowed a melody people already knew and hung a new story on it, the way Woody Guthrie
always did. That lineage isn’t just an influence: he’s since shared Spanish stages with Sarah Lee Guthrie, Johnny
Irion, Scarlet Rivera, Ian Dunlop and his band.
“Cadaqués Cowboy” imagines Salvador Dalí as a spaghetti-western drifter — “kind of an alien, but always playing
with reality.” “Truck Driver,” the album’s foot stomper, grew out of a night in an Alberta, Canada bar with a Trumpvoting trucker he couldn’t stop trying to understand. “Trying to empathize with people who don’t empathize with you
— that’s the central conflict of this whole crisis of democracy that we’re in right now.”
That impulse runs through “Ten Bullets in the Back,” about José Antonio, a boy shot at the Mexican border — a story
that arrived, unannounced, at the Stetson Kennedy Songwriter Residency. “History sometimes just chooses you.”
Elsewhere: “Carolina Peaches” (lockdown New York, South Carolina roots), “Take All the Time You Need” (the road
through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming), “Significant Other” (revived from his old band, the Mountain Men), and “Not
Gonna Write a Song” — a breakup song about refusing to write one, and the album’s closer. It’s the first This Frontier
Needs Heroes album not made in one room: half cut in Barcelona at Slow Sound Studio Sants with Aaron Feder, the
rest recorded pre-move with friends across the US in Nashville, Portland, San Francisco.
Homage to Catalonia is an album about surviving chaos and trying to build a new life while carrying the old one —
made by someone with new surroundings and soil under his boots in a new country, but the American dust that
won’t quite shake off.

released January 15, 2027

Album credits

Artwork by Luigi Falagario