Lydia Loveless rerecords Accolades as the title track of an October EP

Lydia Loveless is putting out an EP called Accolades on 30 October through Bloodshot Records, and its title track is a song that briefly existed once before. Stereogum reports that Accolades started as one of a run of one-off writing-challenge pieces posted to Bandcamp, most of which have since been taken down, that one included. The version leading the EP is a fresh recording.

The record was made in Memphis with Matt Ross-Spang, who co-produced and engineered it at his Southern Grooves studio with a group of local session players. Ross-Spang is a Grammy winner whose credits run through The Mountain Goats, Margo Price and John Prine, and his rooms tend to push a songwriter towards a live band sound rather than a layered one.

Accolades is the centrepiece in a literal sense: two different versions of it sit on a six-song EP, opening the record and closing it as Accolades Reprise. In between come Avoiding Highways, Let Me Get My Hopes Up, Oklahoma and What We Learned. Building a short release around one song twice is a decision that puts a lot of weight on the writing.

Loveless said the heart of the song is "trying to return to a place of quiet observation and meditation", describing the deep dark hole in it as somewhere to sit and think about why you do things rather than somewhere to wallow. There is nostalgia in it too, they said, not for better days but for a sense of self.

The two outlets covering the announcement disagree about what came before it. Stereogum treats the 2023 album Nothing's Gonna Stand In My Way Again as the last full-length; The Line of Best Fit points instead to Something Else in 2024, a record of piano versions of songs from the 2014 album Somewhere Else, and to a 2025 run of a song a month on Bandcamp. Both accounts agree that several of those Bandcamp pieces have ended up here.

The Columbus, Ohio songwriter has been working the roots circuit in the run-up. Loveless played AMERICANAFEST last week and has autumn dates booked, including two November shows with Ha Ha Tonka. Katie Harriman directed the video for the title track.

The Ross-Spang connection is worth following for its own sake. The same producer's work with The Mountain Goats has the same quality of being recorded rather than assembled, and for a writer who has spent a decade being filed under alt-country against her records' actual range, Memphis is a useful place to be sent. Our release calendar carries the date, and the country hub has the rest of the week.