Jessi Colter Explains How Her New Gospel Album "The Psalms" Came About

Coming out tomorrow is Jessi Colter's first album in over a decade. The Psalms features twelve Colter-composed songs with specific Psalms passages as heavy influence on the penned lyrics. What makes this set even more interesting, particularly for Rock fans with attentiveness to the late '70s, is the involvement of Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith Group). Kaye is a producer of this set. 

Colter grew up singing holy songs in a Christian Pentecostal home where the sacred defined daily life in the presence of the secular; her mother was a preacher, but her dad built and drove race cars. Kaye grew up loving the minor key of Jewish cantorial music, but also had an uncle who wrote the lyrics to the love theme from The Godfather. Kaye met Colter in the mid-1990s, while co-writing the memoir of her late husband, Waylon Jennings. 

After dinner one night, Colter drifted into their living room. "We were feeding Lenny because he loved our food, and I just went to the piano one evening," Colter recalls. "It wasn't something I did all the time."

At the keyboard, with a Bible nearby, Colter began singing words to the Psalms of the Old Testament, improvising chords to accompany them. "I was transfixed," Kaye recalls. "I'd never seen anything so pure or immediate. She was placing her fingers on the piano and singing the chords that came out. It was just true belief."

Later, Kaye helped Colter flesh out the arrangements and produce the recordings.

Tracklist:

01. PSALM 150 Praise Ye the Lord 02:49
02. PSALM 75 Unto Thee 03:43
03. PSALM 114 And the Mountains Skip Like Rams 08:39
04. PSALM 99 He Is Holy 02:50
05. PSALM 24 Who Is the King of Glory 03:27
06. PSALM 136 Mercy and Loving Kindness 05:41
07. PSALM 151 King David's Last Psalm 02:57
08. PSALM 21 Be Thou Exalted 03:18
09. PSALM 45 My Song to a King 04:56
10. PSALM 73 Like a Beast 05:34
11. PSALM 23 The Lord Is My Shepherd 02:38
12. PSALM 72 Arise O King of Old 06:48 

Colter will also release her written memoir on April 11 to be published by Harper Collins. It's titled An Outlaw and a Lady: A Memoir of Music, Life With Waylon, and The Faith That Brought Me Home.

Jessi Colter is one of America's most beloved singer-songwriters. Her storied career began in the sixties when, encouraged by her first husband, Duane Eddy, she composed hit songs for Dottie West, Nancy Sinatra, and Hank Locklin. Best known for her collaboration with her husband, Waylon Jennings, and for her 1975 country-pop crossover hit "I'm Not Lisa," she was the only woman featured on the landmark album Wanted: The Outlaws that forever changed American music. She has fifteen major-label albums to her credit, and her songs and records have sold in the tens of millions. 

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