Album artwork for The Midwest Book Of The Dead by Wes Tirey

“One thing that’s maybe particular to the Midwest is a sincerity that can be mistaken for melodrama,” says Wes Tirey. “I don’t think these are Southern songs. I obviously don’t think it’s a New York album, an LA album; not a Nashville album. I think these songs and these characters really exist in the geography of the Midwest.” Tirey’s 10th release — his first for Dear Life, is an intimate study of the Midwestern condition. A double album, it tells of silos like chapels, spiders in the cane, of drunkards and saints and fugitives; it speaks of wild geese, and the good life, rhinestone suits, Coca Colas, and dishes drying on the rack. That sincerity and melodrama resides in the candor and weight of these songs — its playing and arrangements, rich but unfettered, and Tirey’s voice grown several feet deeper and more sonorous. It is a sublime expansion of a trademark style he has come to call “rustic minimalism”.

Wes Tirey

The Midwest Book Of The Dead

Mapache Records
Album artwork for The Midwest Book Of The Dead by Wes Tirey
LPx2

£27.99

Black
Released 27/10/2023Catalogue Number

MAPANC013LP

Learn more
Wes Tirey

The Midwest Book Of The Dead

Mapache Records
Album artwork for The Midwest Book Of The Dead by Wes Tirey
LPx2

£27.99

Black
Released 27/10/2023Catalogue Number

MAPANC013LP

Learn more

“One thing that’s maybe particular to the Midwest is a sincerity that can be mistaken for melodrama,” says Wes Tirey. “I don’t think these are Southern songs. I obviously don’t think it’s a New York album, an LA album; not a Nashville album. I think these songs and these characters really exist in the geography of the Midwest.” Tirey’s 10th release — his first for Dear Life, is an intimate study of the Midwestern condition. A double album, it tells of silos like chapels, spiders in the cane, of drunkards and saints and fugitives; it speaks of wild geese, and the good life, rhinestone suits, Coca Colas, and dishes drying on the rack. That sincerity and melodrama resides in the candor and weight of these songs — its playing and arrangements, rich but unfettered, and Tirey’s voice grown several feet deeper and more sonorous. It is a sublime expansion of a trademark style he has come to call “rustic minimalism”.