Dougie Poole - The Freelancer's Blues (2020)

The Freelancer’s Blues, the second full-length LP from Brooklyn’s country crooner Dougie Poole, captures its current moment like nothing else. Poole updates the storytelling backbone of country music for an audience that is young, urban, romantically alienated and financially pre- carious, using the same threads spun by Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson before him to write his own anthems for a new generation of country music fans. With his debut album Wideass Highway Dougie Poole established himself as forerunner in a class of musicians who grew up in a post-genre ecosystem equally as likely to be influenced by Ariel Pink and Animal Collective as Dolly Parton and Dwight Yoakam. On The Freelancer’s Blues, Dougie graduates from drum machine and synthesizer bedroom country to a full band with honky-tonk harmonies, wailing pedal steel, and carefully constructed arrangements. Produced by Jonathan Schenke (PC Worship, Gong Gong Gong, Public Practice) The Freelancer’s Blues does the seemingly impossible of staying true to Poole’s heritage in the DIY scenes of New York and Providence, while simultaneously certifying him as a country music bonafide.