For most of his life, Earl Thomas Conley gave country radio more than it could keep up with. Eighteen of his songs went to No. 1. But near the end, the people closest to him say he wanted something simple: just one more album.
He made it. He just never saw it come out.
On September 25, 2020, BFD/Audium Nashville released Promised Land: The Lost Album, a set of 12 songs Earl Thomas Conley had recorded back in 2000 and 2001. He had died on April 10, 2019, at the age of 77. The music had been waiting nearly two decades for its turn.
Songs that waited a long time
The story of these songs starts even earlier than the recording sessions. Earl Thomas Conley wrote or co-wrote all 12 of them in the early and mid-1990s, after his remarkable string of hits had wound down. He cut some of them as rough demos back then, but they went no further.
When the new millennium arrived, he came back to them. In 2000 and 2001 he went into the studio and recorded the songs properly. Even then, the album was never released.
By the time anyone outside his circle could hear the full record, close to 20 years had passed since those sessions, and some of the songs were nearly 30 years old.
The producer who had been there from the start
The man producing those sessions was Nelson Larkin, and that name carries a lot of history.
In the early 1970s, Earl Thomas Conley was working in a steel mill in Huntsville, Alabama, when he met Larkin. Larkin helped him sign with GRT Records in 1974, later brought him on as a writer at his publishing company, and went on to produce many of Earl’s biggest albums of the 1980s, including Fire & Smoke, Somewhere Between Right and Wrong and Treadin’ Water. Larkin also co-wrote two of the songs on the lost album
So the last album Earl Thomas Conley ever made was produced by the same man who helped him get started.
Nelson Larkin died in November 2013 at the age of 70. When Promised Land was finally released, neither the singer nor the producer was alive to see it.
A song written with the woman beside him
One track stands out for a personal reason. “Love’s the Only Voice” was written by Earl Thomas Conley and Carole Scates, his longtime partner.
When the album was announced, Carole said the record was long overdue, because Earl had always wanted to put out just “one more album.” It is hard to read that today without thinking of how long that wish had to wait.
What his daughter wanted fans to know
Earl’s youngest daughter, Erinn Scates, described the collection as one of her father’s last efforts at putting an album together, and she believed it held some of his most thoughtful writing.
She also reminded fans that her dad was more than a singer. He was a painter, a craftsman and a sketch artist. Painting had been his first love as a boy in Portsmouth, Ohio, and he once turned down an art-school scholarship. But for all of that, she said, one thing came first:
“Music, most of all, was his truest passion.”
She thanked the fans for loving him as much as the family did, and she dedicated the album to them, and to the man who spent his final years devoted to it.
Hearing him one more time
Earl Thomas Conley’s last years were hard. He stopped touring around 2017 because of his health, and he died after a long struggle with a dementia-like illness and several months in hospice care.
For fans who had not heard new music from him in years, the album was a chance to hear that voice again. The first song shared ahead of the release, “Better Said Than Done,” opens the record with piano and clean electric guitar, close to the blend of country and soft rock that made him a star in the ’80s.
The album takes its name from the seventh track, “Takin’ Me Away From the Promised Land,” one of eight songs he wrote with Ron Reynolds. Every song on it carries his name as a writer.
He never got to hold the finished record in his hands. But the one more album he wanted is out there now, and his fans finally got to hear it.
Did you get a chance to hear Promised Land? Which Earl Thomas Conley song still takes you back?