Sweet Harmony Soul Featuring Mavis Staples, Patty Griffin and Amy Helm & The Handsome Strangers

Soul/gospel legend, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, and civil rights icon Mavis Staples will release her second collaboration with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, One True Vine, June 25 via Anti-. The follow-up to 2010's Grammy-winning You Are Not Alone, One True Vine finds Staples traversing darker terrain with stark, acoustic arrangements and the most honest, unvarnished vocal performances of her career. Featuring ten tracks - including new compositions written specifically for Staples by Tweedy and Nick Lowe along with covers ranging from Funkadelic to Lowe - the record is the most personal and emotional statement from the "American treasure" (Chicago Tribune) yet.
Recorded at The Loft, Wilco's studio in Chicago, the album features Jeff Tweedy on nearly every instrument except drums, which were played by Tweedy's 17-year-old son Spencer. From album opener "Holy Ghost," written by Low's Alan Sparhawk, to the new Tweedy composition "Jesus Wept," the gravity in Staples' voice is transfixing, heavy with burdens but blessed with the promise of true redemption that shines through on Nick Lowe's deft and driving "Far Celestial Shore," Funkadelic's "Can You Get To That," and Pops Staples' uplifting "I Like The Things About Me."
Staples' last collaboration with Tweedy, You Are Not Alone, earned her the highest Billboard chart debut of her 50+ year career, her first Grammy award, and universal critical acclaim. NPR enthused, "she could move a listener to tears," while People Magazine said she "provides the comfort of a higher power." Mavis performed at the Kennedy Center Honors, took the stage at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's massive televised "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear," and performed at the NAACP Image Awards and 2011 VH1 Divas broadcast. She also provided one of the most indelible moments of the 2013 Grammy telecast with a moving tribute to Levon Helm alongside Elton John, Mumford & Sons, Brittany Howard (The Alabama Shakes), T Bone Burnett, and Zac Brown.
You Are Not Alone, which won a Grammy this year, follows her 2007 critical triumph, We'll Never Turn Back, which revisited the great songs of the civil rights era and prompted her hometown paper The Chicago Sun-Times to hail her as "an American treasure."

2008's Live: Hope at the Hideout was named one of the Best Live CDs of All Time by Amazon.com's editors and earned Mavis her first Grammy-nomination as a solo artist.


American Kid, Patty Griffin's seventh album, is her first album of mainly new material since Children Running Through in 2007. In between, she made the Grammy Award-winning Downtown Church (2010), her version of classic gospel (though it featured three original songs). She also became a member of Band of Joy, the group in which leader Robert Plant and his cohorts meld British and American folk, rock and spiritual music.

American Kid, much of which Griffin says "was written to honor my father," returns to typical Patty Griffin territory, which is to say that it features a group of remarkably powerful, personal and unpredictable songs arranged and performed in a style that doesn't entirely repeat anything she's done on her previous albums while drawing on all of them. Yet Griffin's catalog is among the most unified in modern popular music, because her singing is as unmistakable and inimitable as her songwriting.