Chris Shiflett Fuses Honky Tonk With Rock On Upcoming Album

For the past few months, veteran rocker and Foo Fighters six-stringer Chris Shiflett has been sharing new tastes of his signature honky-tonk-meets-rock-and-roll sound.

“Dead and Gone” found the Southern Californian trading licks with Nashville pickers like Tom Bukovac and Charlie Worsham and “Black Top White Lines” put a rocking spin on the classic “murder ballad” format. All of that bridge-building between Music City and his native California will come to fruition on October 20th with the release of Lost at Sea—Shiflett’s new Jaren Johnston-produced album on Blue Élan Records.

Lost at Sea finds Shiflett blurring the lines between his last two albums: West Coast Town’s (2017) honky-tonk homage and Hard Lessons’ (2019) overdriven crunch. Shiflett recorded the majority of the new album in Nashville, working with his aforementioned producer and collaborator Jaren Johnston—frontman of the Cadillac Three, as well as the songwriter behind nearly a dozen Number 1 country hits—and a small cast of Americana all-stars. Among them were fellow guitar slingers Worsham, Bukovac, and Nathan Keeterle, all three of whom laced the record with fiery fretwork. He also teamed up with a number of co-writers, partnering with Kendell Marvel, Cody Jinks, and others to fill Lost at Sea with storylines that pack as hefty a punch as the music itself.

“We wrote a lot of these songs during the lockdown,” recalls Shiflett, who spent much of the pandemic at home in Southern California. “Then I began making trips to Nashville to work with Jaren. He and I have a lot of overlap, in terms of the music we like. We made a guitar-centric record that encapsulates everything I’ve been listening to over the years, from the most country songs I’ve ever recorded to punk rock and even songs that sound like a California version of The Clash.”

“Damage Control” is the track he’s referencing, and it happens to be the next single from Lost at Sea. Straying further from the country influence than most of the album, “Damage Control” is the only “old” tune that Johnston and Shiflett included on Lost at Sea. “All the other tunes were written in the months leading up to recording, but when Jaren and I were sorting out which songs to do he mentioned something about The Clash and I remembered this old one I’d demoed about 15 years prior,” remembers Shiflett. With its layers of reverb, pulsing percussion, and Echoplex tape delay, “Damage Control” went through a number of versions before reaching its final form in the studio with Johnston. “I love that the musical inspiration on this one was late-stage Clash but we wound up layering it with banjos and what-not. Definitely takes it somewhere else. Ska-mericana?” Shiflett laughs. “There’s nothing better than when influences converge taking you places you never expected.”