Mavis Staples

It's A Sad And Beautiful World (and magical Catfish).

IT’S

August 26th 2025 and Mavis Staples has announced her new album Sad and Beautiful World, out November 7th on ANTI Records, with lead single Beautiful Strangers, a song I wrote in 2016.

Sad and Beautiful world gets its name from the title track, one of my favorite Sparklehorse songs, the project of the late Mark Linkous. The album is full of these kinds of sad and beautiful gems - spanning decades of amazing songwriters from Tom Waits to Gillian Welch to Drive By Truckers - with Mavis weaving them all into something more powerful than the originals.

It’s hard to put into words exactly how it feels having someone who I’d consider one of the most important vocalists and cultural figures of the 20th and 21st century, sing something I wrote. Words simply can’t do it justice, and beyond saying “I’m not worthy”, I’ll give it my best shot…

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A

little over a year ago I got a call from Andy Kulkin at ANTI- Records who told me that he and producer Brad Cook (who produced my 2020 album Sundowner) had been pitching songs to Mavis for her next album and that she was gravitating towards Beautiful Strangers. This was a call I wasn’t expecting and beyond my wildest dreams.

After getting the news, I couldn’t help but reread Bob Dylan’s great MusiCares acceptance speech in which he talks about how the most validating part of his career was hearing songwriters he admired most record his songs.

In it he says that the Staples singers were long one of his favorite bands, and that they were the type of artists he wanted recording his songs - and that Nina Simone, another of his favorite artists, validated everything he was about by recording his songs. Suddenly, somehow, this was a sentiment I could now relate to.

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SAD

stories have always resonated with me. Sad songs, sad movies, sad books. I’ve always felt, ever since I was a child, that inside the sadness, something beautiful and honest was hidden away - burrowing at its core. This sad beauty, for me, is the essence of the human condition. Leonard Cohen gets at this sentiment best with his masterful lyric; “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” off of his song Anthem, which Mavis also covers on the album.

When I wrote Beautiful Strangers I had been lying in bed strumming my nylon string guitar, transfixed in the ceiling fan slowly rotating above my head. I was listening to Nina Simone’s To Love Somebody - an album I had been drawn to because of her Dylan and Cohen covers.

I had been trying to learn her arrangement of Suzanne before falling into a similar chord structure with a slightly different rhythm before realizing I was writing my own song. If memory serves, then an hour or so later I had Beautiful Strangers, almost exactly as you hear it on the recording.

I was going through a break up at the time and had wanted to write a song about heartbreak, not just my own, but instead the collective heartbreak the world was experiencing, while somehow making it uplifting. My personal life felt insignificant compared to what was happening in the news with the rise of mass shootings at the Bataclan in Paris and the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Freddie Grey had just been murdered and Baltimore was rioting - all while Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign seemed to be picking up steam. It seemed, at the time, that America, and the world at large, couldn’t possibly get much worse.

I had no plans for an album but felt that it was crucial I release the song as soon as possible, and so we released it as a one off single with proceeds going to Everytown For Gun Safety.

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AND

since it’s release, Beautiful Strangers has gone on to live a life much larger and longer than I had expected. It’s my highest streaming song, and the one most people request at my live shows. It was also in an AIRBNB commercial in 2021 which allowed us to donate a sizable amount of money to seven different charities (a decision that wasn’t easy to make - but ultimately felt best, in part inspired by the advice of one of my heroes Fiona Apple).

Beautiful Strangers is, for lack of a better word, and despite it's unconventional nature - my “hit”. But even still, it is a song that I’ve always felt protective over if not sometimes self conscious about, given its sensitive subject matter. It wields a certain power, and I want to respect that power the best I can.

I felt at the time of writing it though, that it was my duty to report exactly what was happening around me, in large part inspired by the Nina Simone quote; “An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times”.

But to share Dylan’s sentiment; hearing Mavis sing it only validates everything that I am about. And for that I am forever grateful. Hearing her sing it is, without a doubt, the highlight of my career and one of the greatest gifts of my lifetime.

WORLD

War III is being threatened around every corner here in 2025, and the doomsday clock is about to strike midnight, or so I am constantly told. But for someone like Mavis, who has been on this planet earth - and an American - for now 86 years, I’d be willing to bet that doomsday has almost always been promised right around every corner.

In this great conversation between Mavis and Hoosier (who co-writes the song Human Mind on the new album), she recounts her time alongside Dr. Martin Luther King JR., her friendship with Nina Simone, her family band, touring in the Jim Crow South and so much more. Mavis has lived a gigantic and mythical 86 years, and counting. The kind of life that if pitched in a writers room would likely get shot down for being too unbelievable.

But Mavis, in the face of the threat of these looming end times through the past almost one hundred years, as well as tremendous personal loss, has remained a beacon at every turn - one who is constantly reminding us that perhaps it’s not doom that awaits, but love.

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MAGICAL CATFISH

The first time I heard the Mavis version of Beautiful Strangers was early on in the recording process. I had been bugging Brad about it and so he sent me an early draft - with Mavis’s voice over a simple arrangement of guitars and drums.

This being a rare and special moment in my life, I wanted to make a ceremony out of hearing it for the first time and so I took my dog Ernie on a walk to our favorite park to sit on our favorite bench beneath our favorite tree. There, I listened to what Brad had sent me on headphones while Ernie jumped around the grass, running through dandelions.

I was immediately struck by Mavis singing the word “you” rather than “him” during the first verse - reframing the sentiment that getting into heaven isn’t up to anyone but themselves and in that moment I felt she was addressing me directly, through sonic time and space.

Her version, of course, brings tears to my eyes. It is beautiful in a way I could have never imagined and listening to it for that first time gave me something like an out of body experience.

After that first listen, I let the song repeat as I considered the cyclical nature of music. I thought about Bob Dylan as a child hearing the Staples Singers, “like a fog rolling in”, for the first time, in his childhood bedroom, and them later covering his songs. I thought about Nina Simone singing Suzanne and that inspiring me to write Beautiful Strangers and I thought about the first time I heard Dylan in my parents garage, and much like Mavis did to him, making my hair stand up, changing my life forever - giving me the courage and desire to write songs.

And while I by no means mean to insert myself into the conversation with these songwriting and musical titans - and of course only see myself as a student of their game - I do mean to point out the power of music and how it’s almost as present and habitual as the very air we breath. Singing songs, after all, is it’s own form of taking air into the body and then pushing it back out. Unlike most everything else - music doesn’t get thrown away, it recycles.

or put into much sillier terms,

Songs are like magical catfish. You go looking for water and cast your line. And with a little bit of patience and a lot of luck you might end up reeling one in. You document your magical catfish and then release it back into the same mysterious water you took it from. And from there - there’s no telling where it’ll go next.

God bless you Mavis Staples! And thank you.

xoxox