I really hope this means the music is coming soon.
Last year, Shooter Jennings, the son of country stars Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, made an incredibly exciting announcement that he had possession of new, never-before-heard Waylon music that he planned to eventually release to the world.
Waylon passed away in 2002, only a couple of months after he was elected into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Following his death, a number of albums were released posthumously, with the last being Going Down Rocking: The Last Recordings in 2012. Shooter revealed via Instagram, though, has apparently uncovered some more classic Waylon tapes:
“When I was young, in the house that I grew up in, there was a room that was always locked. The ‘storage room’ is what my parents call it. I have vivid memories of dozens of grey boxes in cubby holes with notes jotted in marker on the outside. I knew what was in those boxes was my dad’s work.”
The message went to describe the timeline for getting all of these left-behind recordings put together. In 2002, following the country icon’s passing, all of the tapes were gathered in one place. Six years later in 2008, the physical recordings were transferred to digital. Most recently, in 2014, the digital recording were upgraded to more modern digital storage.
Shooter described what he found as “massive historical documentation” of a man with “incredible friendship, work ethic and deep passion for playing and recording music.” He added that it was “way beyond my wildest fantasies”:
“What I expected to find was a catalog of all of my dad’s albums and recordings. I knew there were a few songs that were never released, for whatever reasons, so I had my fingers crossed that I would maybe find something special and rare along the way that I could share with you.
What I found was massive historical documentation of a man and a band with an incredible friendship, worth ethic and deep passion for playing and recording music. What I found was way beyond my wildest fantasies.”
But it doesn’t stop there…
Shooter, who is a highly-sought after musician and producer himself, is taking on a project to bring to life some of the “lost” tapes that Waylon left behind. Interestingly, he noted that they aren’t unfinished or even demos, but they still need to be mixed and professionally finished before they’re ready to be released:
“I’m in possession of a treasure trove of previously unheard full band Waylon Jennings multi-track recording from the 70’s and early 80’s and I have begun preparing the material to be mixed…
These are not demos. These are not unfinished, but, they will take some time to explore, prepare, and mix. You’ve got something to look forward to – there will be new, classic Waylon Jennings music in 2025. Stay tuned.”
Since this announcement last June, I have been eagerly awaiting more news about it:
And we might not have to wait too much longer to hear it all.
Earlier this week, the Waylon Jennings Instagram account shared a cryptic video of photos from inside the studio, which featured Shooter and other musicians working on something (I think I saw Charley Crockett in there too). The camera panned over recent Polaroids that were placed on a mixing console, which eventually ended with a large photo of Waylon and Jessi in their prime propped up above everything else.
Waylon’s song “A Long Time Ago” played in the background, and there was no caption, so we have to draw our own conclusions in terms of what it means… and maybe I’m just convincing myself it’s a teaser for the real announcement because that’s what I want it to be, but a random post like this wouldn’t really make sense unless they had something coming. It’s possible they had to bring in some session musicians for certain things if parts of the songs were not completely finished, or didn’t sound up to par since they’ve been sitting for so long and were never fully complete to begin with.
Fans in the comments seemed to think that’s what this might be hinting at, too:
Shooter’s doing the Lord’s work, and he said the project would be out sometime in 2025, so finger’s crossed there’s more to come sooner rather than later.
“A Long Time Ago”
