Stream: The Parson Red Heads, ‘All I Wanted’ and ‘Turn Around’

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The Parson Red Heads

Fifteen years since the Parson Red Heads brightened L.A.’s indie landscape by moving down from the Pacific Northwest, and a decade since they returned to Portland, the beloved Americana outfit is still going strong, albeit in a slightly different form.

Founding guitarist Sam Fowles departed the band after the Red Heads’ 2017 full-length “Blurred Harmony,” so live guitarist Jake Smith stepped in to join the lineup of Evan and Brett Marie Way, Robbie Augspurger and Raymond Richards. “Picking up and deciding to keep making new music and playing after Sam left wasn’t the easiest thing in the world,” singer-guitarist Evan Way says. “I don’t think we thought we’d fully break up and just stop, but it was still hard to deal with one of the very foundational members of this group no longer being there.”

But they have carried on to make their fifth album, “Lifetime of Comedy,” out Nov. 13.

Produced and engineered by Richards, whose fingerprints are on albums by the likes of Local Natives, Blitzen Trapper, HoneyHoney and the Blank Tapes, “Lifetime of Comedy” is an album of personal reckoning set to the Red Heads’ harmony-laden, celestial Americana.

“All I wanted was for you to know / This was not a waste of time,” Evan sings over sweet pedal steel on “All I Wanted.” Byrdsian jangle flavors the second single “Turn Around,” which, like most of the Red Heads’ catalog, sounds as open-hearted and uplifting as our best aspirations.

||| Stream: “All I Wanted” and “Turn Around”

||| Previously: “Coming Down,” “Times,” “Another Chance,” “Seven Years Ago,” “Burning Up the Sky”