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12 ноя 2025
RIVAL SONS Frontman JAY BUCHANAN Announces Debut Solo Album 'Weapons Of Beauty', Shares 'Caroline' Single
With "Weapons Of Beauty", Buchanan — the hard-eyed, preacher-voiced frontman of Grammy-nominated RIVAL SONS — steps fully into his own. A debut solo record that trades the thunder of the stage for something slower and more cinematic: a high-and-lonesome desert song from a man unsteady under the weight of his past, carrying it like a heavy sack of gold into his future.
Buchanan stands tall among the breakthrough vocalists of the last two decades — just as comfortable singing with Jason Isbell, THE BEE GEES, Miranda Lambert, MASSIVE ATTACK, THE BLOODY BEETROOTS or Brandi Carlile as with the arena-rock band he's best known for. His voice remains his signature instrument: powerful, earthen, and impossibly expressive — a gritty echo of the California mountains themselves.
In preparation for "Weapons Of Beauty", Jay disappeared into the Mojave Desert for three months, holed up writing in an underground, windowless bunker. His goal wasn't escape so much as renewal: living simply in the tiny space, powered by a gas generator, writing by firelight at the foot of abandoned gold mines.
"The silence," he says, "was both terrifying and liberating. A caterpillar knows when it's time to get into the cocoon."
Out there, surrounded by heat and horizon, Buchanan began shaping songs about longing, endurance, and an almost romantic celebration of the hard-worn miles living by prospect across the American landscape.
Spanning ten tracks, "Weapons Of Beauty" traces Buchanan through the sun-bleached dust of an American-gothic wilderness. The album opens with "Caroline", a spare, aching letter to a lost home or lover, introducing a recurring theme of return and forgiveness — a song that promises to bring a tear to the eye, a classic wounded tale of loss told in a way that is wholly his own.
"I suppose that writing about unquenchable grief allows you a kind of permission to pay respect to those deep chasms in your life without wallowing in them," Buchanan states. "Putting it in a song lets you buy the ticket and take the ride — and then move on."
Filmed in the same gold mines Jay frequented while sequestered in the Mojave Desert, the video illustrates the journey of a couple in sickness and in health. Buchanan performs to the camera as their memories play out through projections on the cave walls behind him.
"I can see a parallel here," Buchanan adds, "spending twelve hours deep in the earth, trying to mine our own treasure, knowing full well so many have perished in those same caves chasing a future cut dangerously short. That's a hell of a way to spend a Sunday!"
Most recently, Buchanan delivered an explosive performance as the frontman of the Stone Pony house band in the Springsteen biopic "Deliver Me From Nowhere". Talking about his involvement, Buchanan states: "More than anything, it was just a really good hang. I played a band leader, so no acting there. Being on stage together playing music was about bringing Jeremy [Allen White] into my world, and being on camera in a film was about him bringing me into his. It was amazing. Jeremy and Scott [Cooper] made me feel like I belonged there — and that was just what I needed."
"Weapons Of Beauty" displays nearly fifty minutes of masterful storytelling and heart-breaking lyricism. If it feels cinematic, there's a reason: Buchanan entrusted acclaimed filmmaker Scott Cooper (who directed him in the Springsteen film) to sequence the album — a task Cooper generously took on.
"On the flight home after the film wrapped, Scott and I had a conversation that stayed with me as I went directly to the desert," Buchanan says. "I don't want to get too personal, but we were kind of living on opposite sides of the same coin that day, and he was the last person I spoke to before my desert exile. Months later, the night the record was finished, when I listened to the playback for the first time, I immediately thought of him sequencing it. The whole undertaking had left me so raw that the pan was just too hot for me to pick up. I knew I could trust him — if he'd help me."
Cooper wasn't the only friend to lend a creative hand. Buchanan enlisted lauded American realist painter Jeremy Lipking to create the album's rich, romantic cover painting — a perfect companion to its vision of the American landscape.
"Jeremy Lipking is an old friend and family on my wife's side," Buchanan explains. "We've been wanting to work together forever. He was the only person to hear some of my demos direct from the desert. I told him I was writing a Jeremy Lipking painting. It was important to me that the music have a scenic quality — the America I've seen over decades of touring: lonesome sunsets, big-clouded skies, silhouetted by our dreams and failures."
"Weapons Of Beauty" track listing:
01. Caroline
02. High And Lonesome
03. True Black
04. Tumbleweeds
05. Shower Of Roses
06. Deep Swimming
07. Sway
08. The Great Divide
09. Dance Me To The End Of Love
10. Weapons Of Beauty
"As music continues to be choked out by technology, I wanted to draw pictures in the dirt," states Buchanan. "This approach is right with me, and I've just come to a point where there is no longer a choice. 'Weapons Of Beauty' is the sound of these plates shifting within me, too loud to ignore. Surprisingly, I've never known a vulnerability to feel so empowering."
Photo by Matthew Wignall
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