Kevin Bronson on June 13th, 2023

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Jonathan Wilson says he pretty much let his musical freak flag fly in hatching his new album, “Eat the Worm,” arriving Sept. 8.

Witness the 6-minute display of whimsy and wanderlust that is the newly revealed track “Charlie Parker.” Wilson calls it “a fantastical and fictitious flight of fancy and fantasy.”

He adds: “It also touches on the ups and downs of my life over the past decade as a touring musician, and more. It’s filled with strings, horns, fuzzy guitars, tubular bells, and a few bebop elements as well, hence the name. In a way, ‘Charlie Parker’ encompasses what the new record is all about: adventure, fidelity and fun.” The video, created by his wife, the artist Andrea Nakhla, uses AI stable diffusion.

“Eat the Worm” is the fifth full-length from Wilson, who in 15 years since moving from North Carolina to L.A. has becoming a go-to producer (among his credits: albums by Father John Misty, Margo Price, Billy Strings, Conor Oberst, Roy Harper, Dawes and Angel Olsen), multi-instrumentalist and touring player.

“A lot of this batch of songs is a reaction to the production stuff that I do,” Wilson says of “Eat the Worm,” the follow-up to 2020’s made-in-Nashville “Dixie Blur” “I would be in the studio, doing long days with folks, and I’ll have some wild, off-the-wall ideas and they’re like, ‘no, no, no, that sounds crazy, JW.’ So I would save them up for my album. I’m finally at a place to feel totally free to take chances and resist the urge to dumb things down. It’s got to be kind of strange.”

Contributors on the album include Jake Blanton (The Killers), C.J. Camerieri (Bon Iver), Rita Andrade (Kanye West), Wynton Grant (Miley Cyrus, Hans Zimmer) and Paul Cartwright (Lana Del Rey, Mary J. Blige).

||| Watch: The video for “Charlie Parker”

||| Also: Stream “Marzipan”

||| Previously: “In Heaven Making Love,” “There’s a Light,” “Loving You,” “Move Over Midnight,” “Dear Friend,” live at the Getty (2014), “Love to Love,” 2011 interview