Never-before-released children's album by Texas country/roots/rock-n-roll icon Joe Ely. The album has been in production since 1984 and is being released for the first time. Joe Ely has released a whole lotta records over the last 50 years, but not even half as many albums as he’s made. But happily for fans the world over, ever since 2007, Ely’s made a concerted effort to release a steady stream of pearls from that vault on his own Rack ’Em Records label. And this October — the same month as Ely’s induction into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame — he’s finally sharing what might well be the mother of them all: Flatland Lullaby.

Now, to clarify: Flatland Lullaby is not necessarily what anyone, least of all Ely himself, would ever call a “big" record. So go ahead and exhale if for a moment there you were thinking it was going to be, say, some kind of previously never-even-heard-about, full-on collaboration with the Clash, or even another treasure chest full of long-lost Flatlanders gold along the lines of 2012’s The Odessa Tapes. That said, though, Flatland Lullaby really is a gift objectively more special by far than anything else released from Ely’s archives to date, because this one comes straight off the very top shelf of the family reserve. It’s the kind of passion project that could have only ever come into focus when the initial target audience extended no farther than the man’s nearest and dearest — namely, his daughter Marie. “It’s basically a little lullaby album that I did for her when she was 2 or 3 years old,” says Ely