There's always struggle, and there's always hope.
“I love these songs because you can hear the hope in them, but you can feel the weight of the circumstances, too.” That tension, never one without the other, is the whole engine of Hard Times.
It traces back to an old Alvarez guitar found behind stacks of Motown and '70s records in his mother's closet. Through Texas bus rides, a band called The 71s, and a Springsteen-esque grasp on the beauty that only lives in grit. This record is both a reintroduction and a return for an artist who's pushed through plenty of starts and stops, and has never been anything but exactly who he is.
Now, for the first time, those ten songs get pressed to vinyl, and the earliest fans get the only signed, numbered, print-bundled copies that will ever exist.
