John Calvin Abney rises from the plains of Oklahoma with his latest album, Transparent Towns. The ten songs are about how we remember and ultimately accept, although he is not always sure if the memories we carry with us adequately mark the moments that make us who we are. "This record is about the passage of time, whether or not we can trust the memories we swear by, how we forgive ourselves and others when the seasons change, and how we define what's important when we roll the boulder back up the mountain," Abney says of Transparent Towns. "We build these routines and live our stories, we rely on our history and our memories - spoken and recorded. Now we rely on copies of copies, memories of memories, all packed into our phones like sardines, and we lose the ability to tell our own stories. I have to constantly remind myself and redefine what counts at the end of the day." Transparent Towns is Abney's seventh studio album and his first since 2022's Tourist, which he wrote as an itinerant writer. In contrast, Abney wrote most of the album's 10 tracks during a period of introspection and convalescence while recovering from vocal cord surgery in 2023. The time for himself — "I didn't sing for almost a year, and after the operation I couldn't speak for a month and I couldn't sing for over three months," he says — got him thinking about how he could record his experiences in silence. The album's title song is Abney's exploration of the inaccessible past, of loss and grief over the years, of condemning the "days we leave unsaid," and of accepting the uncontrollable circumstances we sometimes find ourselves in. The sorrows and joys are vivid in the memory, but you wonder if you remember correctly," Abney notes. I've sometimes had this kind of confusion between memory and dreams—you craft in your head an ideal of how things were or could be, in order to soften the blow of harsher reality. Oklahoma. Although he was born in America's largest small town, Reno, Nevada, he grew up in Tulsa, where he learned guitar and piano, playing in bars and home improvement stores from Norman to Stillwater. His affinity for the country in which he grew up is also evident in the production of Transparent Towns. Abney produced the album himself and recorded most of it at Cardinal Song outside of Oklahoma City, with Michael Trepagnier in charge of mixing and engineering. The band also consisted largely of musicians from the state of Sooner, with Lydia Loveless and John Moreland contributing harmony vocals. His distinctive, vulnerable voice and lyrical signature shine through in each of the songs, along with his penchant for alternative pop melodies underpinned with colorful chords and subtle soundscapes. After years of touring in support of artists such as Moreland, Wild Child, Ben Kweller and S.G. Goodman, Abney is now back in a starring role, pushing forward with loving lament and defiant joy in Transparent Towns, urging us to leave behind the pressure we put on ourselves and realize that we are that an end is not the same as an end.