Paging Mr. Proust by The Jayhawks

Paging Mr. Proust, the Jayhawks' ninth studio album, landed on Thirty Tigers in 2016 with Peter Buck and Tucker Martine sharing the producer's chair. Mark Olson had come back for Mockingbird Time in 2011 and walked out again a year later, so this is Gary Louris' band through and through: he demoed the songs in his home studio and drilled the group harder in pre-production than on any Jayhawks record before it. The lineup, Louris, Kraig Johnson, Marc Perlman, Karen Grotberg and Tim O'Reagan, is the same one that cut Smile, with session man John Jackson adding guitar, mandolin and fiddle.

The payoff is a record that roughs up the Twin Cities alt-country sound the band helped shape: the lonesome harmonies are intact, but the edges are jagged and the angles odd, which is just what AllMusic's Mark Deming praised. "Quiet Corners and Empty Spaces" is the song that has hung on. Johnson left before the tour, and Jackson stepped in.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.