Kevin Coleman is a Nashville guitarist and songwriter who’s been quietly building one of the more interesting catalogs in the city’s underground, and on July 17, he’s back with K.C. Blues, the follow-up to 2024’s Imaginary Conversations. It’s coming out as a joint release between Centripetal Force (USA) and Ramble Records (Australia), pressed on 200 copies of vinyl with a digital release to match. Preorders went live on June 15.
The seeds of this record go back to Coleman sitting with the political and cultural atmosphere of 2024. He’d been deep in the history of interwar Europe, struck by the echoes between that moment and the one we’re living through now, and he set out to make something like a broad reflection on instability and uncertainty. But the writing process bled into 2025, and the songs turned inward. What’s left on the finished record is less a statement than a set of feelings of confusion, exhaustion, and unease, something most of us can probably relate to.
Like Imaginary Conversations before it, K.C. Blues never saw the inside of a real studio. It was built in bedrooms, basements, and home setups around Nashville, and the limitations of that environment aren’t hidden; they’re baked in. Broken gear, scheduling headaches, the whole mess of making a record on nobody’s timeline but your own. Coleman let those conditions leave fingerprints on the record rather than scrubbing them out. If a take had the right feeling, it stayed.
Imaginary Conversations was a layered, overdub-heavy, tightly arranged thing. K.C. Blues opens the windows. A lot of that comes down to Trevor Nikrant (Styrofoam Winos, MJ Lenderman, Ryan Davis’s Roadhouse Band), who was in the room for most of the sessions, pushing Coleman toward looser, more spontaneous territory. Several tracks grew straight out of improvised sessions with Tommy Stangroom and J.W. Bird.
Underneath the looseness, though, is a deep well of country blues. Coleman’s first guitar inspirations came from 1920s and ’30s blues records, and you can hear that lineage running the length of this thing. That, plus a real interest in old field recordings and archival folk music. Layer the live-improv instincts Coleman’s picked up from years of gigging on top of that old, dusty foundation, and you get a record that’s pulling from two directions at once: deep tradition and total looseness, somehow making peace with each other.
K.C. Blues isn’t a tidy sequel. It’s Coleman taking the ideas from Imaginary Conversations and cracking them open, letting in more air, more collaborators, more chance. Fans of basement-tape blues and the unfussed-over spirit of Jack Rose or Michael Hurley should dig this one.
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