Alex Dupree - Talking to the Dog (2026) [Hi-Res]

Hank Williams once said that writing a song is just talking to the dog. That little piece of absurdist wisdom has become a title and guiding principle for Alex Dupree’s latest LP.

What does it mean? Hank was likely just promoting his then-hit single “Move It On Over” to a radio interviewer. But Alex’s answers veer quickly into the mystical and visionary. He is a poet of rare composure and grace, and maybe for the first time in his 20+ year career, he’s found the band, the chords, and the arrangements to inject an almost inconceivable richness of color into his musical ideas.

The result is a legitimate mid-career masterpiece that announces Alex as a talent capable of equaling the brilliance of Cass McCombs, Bill Callahan, Neko Case, Ryan Davis, Joanna Newsom, Will Oldham, and other leaders of modern song.

You can throw a rock at Talking to the Dog and anywhere it lands you will find something inspired and kinetic. “Voyager Blues” channels the blurry but assured ecstasy of Jim Sullivan’s U.F.O. “New Meaning” has a fucked up, hearty wistfulness to it that lives somewhere between the tender, booze-soaked domesticity of Music from Big Pink and the wiry, cosmic range of Gene Clark’s No Other. And “Zodiac” rides the hallucinatory astral plane that David Crosby blissfully floated on throughout If I Could Only Remember My Name.

You might think I’m crazy to compare a relatively unknown forty-something year old songwriter’s output to some of the greatest guitar-led songwriter records in collective memory. I’m crazy and I’m right. And fortunately, Alex has the talent and sheer audacity to back me up. I mean, on this album he does a minimalist reinterpretation of one of Scott Walker’s most beautiful compositions (“On Your Own Again”). Not only does he pull it off gorgeously, he manages to make the song feel uniquely his own. Alex lands the same trick on a Michael Hurley rarity (“You’re a Dog, Don’t Talk to Me”), bringing in new lyrics and a new arrangement that elevate the tune into one of the most wonderfully zen moments of outsider folksong I can think of.

For all of its high-concept lyricism, nothing about this record feels heavy or ponderous. Quite the contrary. It sounds like a record that was made fast. Like a band in the room, learning the music together and putting it down in one or two takes. The energy is spontaneous and the music is alive to its own ideas. If songwriting is talking to the dog, then Alex is proving that he speaks dog fluently. All that’s left for you to do is to take the leap of faith and believe.

Believe in Dog.
- Matt Kivel, May 2026, Los Angeles