JAY BUCHANAN, FRONTMAN OF RIVAL SONS, ANNOUNCES DEBUT SOLO RECORD "WEAPONS OF BEAUTY"
“As music continues to be choked out by technology, I wanted to draw pictures in the dirt,” states Buchanan. “This approach is right with me, and I’ve just come to a point where there is no longer a choice. Weapons Of Beauty is the sound of these plates shifting within me, too loud to ignore. Surprisingly, I’ve never known a vulnerability to feel so empowering.”
Jay Buchanan — frontman of American rock band Rival Sons — announces his debut solo album, Weapons Of Beauty, coming February 6, 2026 on Sacred Tongue Records via Thirty Tigers, hot on the heels of his recent appearance in the Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere, now in cinemas worldwide.
With Weapons Of Beauty, Buchanan — the hard-eyed, preacher-voiced frontman of Grammy-nominated Rival Sons — steps fully into his own. A debut solo record that trades the thunder of the stage for something slower and more cinematic: a high-and-lonesome desert song from a man unsteady under the weight of his past, carrying it like a heavy sack of gold into his future.
Buchanan stands tall among the breakthrough vocalists of the last two decades — just as comfortable singing with Jason Isbell, The Bee Gees, Miranda Lambert, Massive Attack, The Bloody Beetroots, or Brandi Carlile as with the arena-rock band he’s best known for. His voice remains his signature instrument: powerful, earthen, and impossibly expressive — a gritty echo of the California mountains themselves.
In preparation for Weapons Of Beauty, Jay disappeared into the Mojave Desert for three months, holed up writing in an underground, windowless bunker. His goal wasn’t escape so much as renewal: living simply in the tiny space, powered by a gas generator, writing by firelight at the foot of abandoned gold mines.
“The silence,” he says, “was both terrifying and liberating. A caterpillar knows when it’s time to get into the cocoon.”
Out there, surrounded by heat and horizon, Buchanan began shaping songs about longing, endurance, and an almost romantic celebration of the hard-worn miles living by prospect across the American landscape.
Spanning ten tracks, Weapons Of Beauty traces Buchanan through the sun-bleached dust of an American-gothic wilderness. The album opens with “Caroline”, a spare, aching letter to a lost home or lover, introducing a recurring theme of return and forgiveness — a song that promises to bring a tear to the eye, a classic wounded tale of loss told in a way that is wholly his own.
“I suppose that writing about unquenchable grief allows you a kind of permission to pay respect to those deep chasms in your life without wallowing in them,” Buchanan states. “Putting it in a song lets you buy the ticket and take the ride — and then move on.”
THE “CAROLINE” VIDEO ▼
Filmed in the same gold mines Jay frequented while sequestered in the Mojave Desert, the video illustrates the journey of a couple in sickness and in health. Buchanan performs to the camera as their memories play out through projections on the cave walls behind him.
“I can see a parallel here,” Buchanan adds, “spending twelve hours deep in the earth, trying to mine our own treasure, knowing full well so many have perished in those same caves chasing a future cut dangerously short. That’s a hell of a way to spend a Sunday!”
Website: weaponsofbeauty.com
WEAPONS OF BEAUTY TRACKLIST
- Caroline
- High And Lonesome
- True Black
- Tumbleweeds
- Shower of Roses
- Deep Swimming
- Sway
- The Great Divide
- Dance Me to the End of Love
- Weapons of Beauty
Released on Sacred Tongue Records via Thirty Tigers
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