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Cadaques Cowboy 5:280:00/5:28
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Truck Driver 5:270:00/5:27
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0:00/3:23
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0:00/3:43
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Carolina Peaches 8:000:00/8:00
This frontier Needs Heroes
Homage to Catalonia
This Frontier Needs Heroes is led by singer-songwriter Bradley Lauretti, who in various forms and lineup changes, has spent the past 20 years playing shows all over the world. One night with Bradley will run the gamut of all human emotions from humor, hedonism, and activism to heartbreaking sadness. Cosmic Americana drifts from Folk-Rock anthems to indie folk, flares of psychedelic, alt-country, to straight-up storytelling you get it all in one song. Influenced by songwriters like John Prine, Woody Guthrie, Billy Bragg, Kris Kristofferson, and Townes Van Zandt his timeless songs mix love, humor, and protest seamlessly to get you through the tough times.
Bradley has traveled around a lot including stints in NYC, Nashville, Miami, and now Barcelona. He has performed at Fundacio Miro Mallorca, El Rodeo, Retrospectrum: Bob Dylan at the Frost Art Museum, Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, Folk Alliance International, Nordic Folk Alliance, Gamble Rogers Folk Festival, Gram Parsons Guitar Pull, End of the Road (UK), Reeperbahn, Athfest, Sing Out Loud, Savannah Stopover, and a finalist in the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest. He is also the founder of the Stetson Kennedy Songwriter Residency.
He has also recently supported Scarlet Rivera, Johnny Irion, Ian Dunlop, Sarah Lee Guthrie, and other artists such as Kath Bloom, Tallest Man on Earth, Handsome Family, Gruff Rhys, Daniel Romano, Cate Le Bon, David Dondero, Dar Williams, Chatham County Line, Scott H. Biram, She Keeps Bees and The Blank Tapes.
Project details
The last three This Frontier Needs Heroes records have unwound like a trilogy about living inside the chaos of the times. 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 Trump-voting 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. Elsewhere: "Carolina Peaches" (lockdown New York, South Carolina roots), "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.
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