John Calvin Abney

Transparent Towns, Abney’s first record since 2022’s Tourist, was penned during a period of introspection and convalescence while Abney was recovering from vocal cord surgery in 2023. The time to himself, a year without singing and months spent in near-total silence, left him contemplating how to trace his experiences within quiet and stillness. The result is a collection of ten songs that seek meaning in the invisible markers of time — old cafes, forgotten voices, small towns transformed and abandoned. Magnet Magazine praises, "With his inner voice as his guide, he crafted a richly detailed small-town scenescape ravaged and remade by progress and loss. Musically, Abney finds ample rewards in the not-so-vast expanse between Elliott Smith’s Either/Or and Neil Young’s Harvest. And he’s in fine singing voice, too." Under the Radar adds that the new music "recalls the softer side of singer/songwriters like Elliott Smith or Jason Molina, wordsmiths who were able to transmute interior storms into moments of universal poeticism." Abney self-produced the new record at Cardinal Song near Oklahoma City, with Michael Trepagnier handling mixing and engineering, and the sessions feature a cast of mostly Sooner State musicians, along with vocal harmony contributions from Lydia Loveless on the title track and from John Moreland on “Who You Thought I Was”.