Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives

“You have to make the music that’s in your heart,” says Marty Stuart. “Sometimes that lines up with what’s going on out there in the world, sometimes it takes the world thirty or forty years to catch up, but if you’re true to your heart, that’s all that matters.”

Altitude, Stuart’s exhilarating new album, is proof of that. Recorded in Nashville with his longtime band, The Fabulous Superlatives, the collection finds Stuart picking up where he left off on 2017’s Way Out West, exploring a cosmic country landscape populated by dreamers and drifters, misfits and angels, honky-tonk heroes and lonesome lovers. There’s a desert flare to the music here, a sweeping, spacious feel that conjures up wide-open horizons and endless stretches of two-lane highway, and the production is raw and cinematic to match, tipping its cap both to Bakersfield and Laurel Canyon as it balances jangle and twang in equal measure. It would be easy for an artist as accomplished as Stuart to rest on his laurels at this point in his career, but Altitude instead showcases the work of a searcher with an insatiable appetite for growth and reflection, one whose ambition, much like his keen wit and rich imagination, only seems to grow with each and every release.

“I’ve always loved songs that feel like old friends but still sound new and fresh,” says Stuart. “The beautiful thing about country music is that the blueprint Jimmie Rodgers laid down-rambling, gambling, sin, redemption, Heaven, Hell-it’s all just as relevant now as it ever was. It’s the human condition, and if you’re honest about it and you’ve got a real band around you, you can make something that’s uniquely yours and stands the test of time.”