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Rolling Stone All Access

Rival Son’s Jay Buchanan: The Best Singer You Haven’t Heard

Rolling Stone All Access

Rolling Stone

Music, Music Interviews, Music Commentary

4.01.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2026

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As the singer of Rival Sons, Jay Buchanan has one of the most powerful voices in all of music, but on his new solo album, Weapons of Beauty, he dials back the volume in favor of a rootsy, Americana approach. The results are stunning. In a special episode of Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now, taped in front of a live audience, Buchanan talks about writing the album off the grid in the Mojave desert, where he slept with a pistol beneath his pillow. He also goes deep on his role in the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere, and shares how Springsteen’s Nebraska inspired his new chapter. If you don’t know Jay Buchanan, you will now.    Country is Here…Nashville is Now.   Check out our Hear Now playlist on Spotify, updated weekly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:31.4

Welcome to Rolling Stones Nashville Now podcast. I'm your host, senior music editor Joseph Hudak.

0:41.1

Welcome to a new week, a new show, a new experience. We actually take the podcast out on the road this week.

0:48.3

We went to Vinyl Tap, which is one of our favorite haunts here in East Nashville.

0:54.5

If you haven't been, if you come to Nashville, be sure to check it out if you are a fan of vinyl

0:59.0

and of drinking.

1:01.1

It is a full bar and also a record shop, which to me sounds like heaven on earth.

1:07.6

Wonderful people there, a wonderful little stage where they do live music.

1:11.9

And they also do some Q&As on this particular night. We were lucky enough to sit with

1:17.7

Jay Buchanan, the lead singer of the band Rival Sons. He has a new album out, a solo album,

1:24.5

titled Weapons of Beauty, produced by Dave Cobb. And we went on down there and sat on

1:30.5

stage with Jay and did a live taping of Nashville now in front of an audience of his fans and some

1:36.5

folks at the bar. And it was a heck of a lot of fun. Yeah, you're going to dig it. Jay's really great.

1:41.2

Highly recommend the Weapons of Beauty album. He recorded it in Savannah with Dave

1:48.0

Cobb, who of course produced Chris Stapleton, a whole bunch of big albums. Dave is such a big deal

1:54.2

in the country music and Americana space. He went down to Savannah to record with Dave. But prior to that,

2:00.7

Jay Buchanan wrote the songs

2:02.9

for the album in an underground bunker in the Mojave Desert. Yeah, it's as bad shit as it sounds.

...

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