In the summer of 2025, Los Angeles-based country artist Jonny Fritz released his first recorded music after a near decade-long hiatus from the music business. “Debbie Downers”, however, would not be the start of your typical record release cycle, but a multi-album, genre-spanning spectacle meant to bring Jonny’s songwriting to new sonic worlds and challenge the consumption-obsessed nature of the modern digital music landscape. Debbie Downers part one, a classic sounding Americana album recorded in Nashville, was released in October, 2025. The next installment, Debbie Downers – Woodwinds, sees the original album’s nine tracks reimagined with an all-woodwinds ensemble, composed by Andrew Conrad. 

“I love woodwinds and have wanted to make this type of record for as long as I can remember. I’ve had this vision of clarinets playing chicken pickin style telecaster solos. Just imagine a Jerry Reed covers album played with clarinets and piccolos. There’s something about the staccato tonguing of a reed instrument that seems to me as enjoyable as playing roadhouse country solos. I’ve never played one so I don’t know but I do think about it all the time. I couldn’t be happier to finally hear it out loud and share it with the world.

The version of this record I brought to Andrew Conrad was very different from what it became. My version was Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and he made it into The Star Wars Theme (or something like that). He was so clearly over-qualified for the job and it made me appreciate him even more.” – Jonny Fritz

photography by Mama Hotdog (Bobbi Rich)

Two more versions, to be released later in 2026, will complete the collection. Continue reading to learn more about the project and the enigmatic Jonny Fritz:

For 15 years, Jonny Fritz relentlessly traveled the world as a country music eccentric. You could find him everywhere: onstage, singing songs about laser hair removal and the age old debate of Ford VS Chevy; in Jackson Browne’s recording studio, tracking his debut for ATO Records; in the writing room, penning Top 40 hits for Dawes and cult classics for himself. Fritz put in the hours, climbing the music industry’s long ladder with a novelty-golf-ball-concession-stand sized personality whose sheer weirdness didn’t overshadow, but rather magnified, his genuine talent at songwriting.

Then, one day, he just quit. “I think I kinda overdid it,” he says, thinking back to his decision to leave the road for nearly a decade. “I worried that if I kept making music not only as my passion, but also as my paycheck, it was going to ruin it for me. I needed music to be kept pure and free from the burdens of economics.” What followed was a long break from the limelight. Jonny became a father, settled into his new home in Altadena, and rebranded himself as “L.A.’s Only Realtor,” bringing his wild brand of creativity to the real estate market. For years, he avoided the recording studio and the road altogether. When he finally returned, it was to make Debbie Downers: a collection of four interlinked records, each one featuring a wildly unique interpretation of the same album. First on the menu is the country version, recorded in Nashville, produced by Jordan Lehning and a band of world-class studio musicians. Think of this as the album. Three variations of the album follow in stride. The next course features a version that was arranged and recorded with a quintet of woodwinds. The only real note that arranger Andrew Conrad was given was to “make it sound like tea time on The Titanic”. Here Fritz traded guitars for a wholly unexpected mix of clarinet, flute, and piccolo. Two more albums with different themes TBA.

“I had an idea — a dumb idea, maybe, and I followed it through, making these albums exactly

as I’d envisioned. And hey, at least it was expensive —” he says. “It’s so easy to fall into a pattern of saying, ‘Well, the label wants things to sound a certain way’ or ‘I’m not sure we can afford this,’ but I didn’t want any of that to influence my decision making. I just wanted to stay true to myself. Artistic integrity is worth so much more than any monetary payback, so this project has already been a major success to me, simply because I haven’t compromised or done anything conventional yet. I think that’s the key to success, actually.”

There’s an ancillary benefit, too. “When you release a record, everyone forgets about it a week after it comes out,” Fritz explains. “But I made four different versions of the same record and I’m going to release them over the course of a year. Now I can say, ‘I made a record! … Oh, you forgot about it? Well, HERE IT IS AGAIN!’” (Used-car salesman voice)

Years spent in the real estate market haven’t dulled Fritz’s sense of humor. On the Nashville recording of “Hot Chicken Condos,” he blasts the city’s celebrity and bachelorette party culture, mixing mischief and melody in equal amounts. “I love Nashville,” he promises. “I lived there for a decade, but I think it all just got too L.A. for me… so I moved to Los Angeles. I watched all my favorite places in Nashville get torn down, then rebuilt and rebranded as hot-chicken-themed tourist traps.” On “Have You Seen Her,” he croons his way through a plot summary of the Spike Jonze film “Her” while also delivering some unexpectedly moving thoughts about partnership and romance. “Love transcends the boundaries and the limits of the eye,” he sings, backed by a loping, trail-riding groove on the album’s Nashville recording and flanked by single-reed instruments on the woodwinds version. It’s a moment that’s both poignant and preposterous in the same breath, and it’s there — in the grey space between the humorous and the heartfelt — that Fritz has always done his best work.

Case in point: “Tea Man,” a gorgeously breezy tribute to his favorite caffeinated beverage. “I’m a tea man, and I can drink more than England,” he sings with an almost audible smile, as though he’s two sips into his first cup of the day. Country music boasts a long history of drinking songs, but “Tea Man” is something different: sober, playful, and stunning all the same. In other words, it’s the sort of left-field song that Fritz excels at delivering. “When I first came on the scene, everybody said, ‘This guy is the next outlaw!'” he says. “But I’m no outlaw. I’m a marathon runner who obsesses over Ken Burns’ The Civil War and drinking tea. I don’t even drink coffee and I hate weed. I’m more like somebody’s weird dad. That’s why I coined the genre ‘Dad country.’ I’m much more interested in the mundane than the extreme. I like the nuance — the in-between stuff. I live for that grey area and rely heavily on it for inspiration. I couldn’t care less about anything ‘outlaw’ and I’ll never write about ‘traveling down a whiskey-soaked highway.’ I never want to say anything anyone has ever said before.”

Entirely self-funded and independently conceived, Debbie Downers is a project fueled not by the music industry, but by a genuine love of music itself. Whether he’s skewering his MAGA relatives (“Debbie Downers”), singing about the challenges of working at Walgreens with your roommate (“The Boss”), or sketching the portrait of a divorced father “trying hard to ignore the looks from the earth-tone moms” at the neighborhood playground, Fritz turns the everyday

into the anthemic, creating a colorful soundtrack for blue-collar life. He’s rested and rebalanced, back in the saddle after a long, voluntary break from the road. This time around, though, he’ll be following his own path, not getting derailed by false hopes of pleasing the masses through convention, but rather aiming to please himself and his community of respected musicians.

TRACKLIST

1. Debbie Downers
2. Polished Turd
3. Hot Chicken Condos
4. Run
5. Tea Man
6. Bikers
7. Have You Seen Her
8. The Boss
9. Slow Down

UPCOMING TOUR DATES

February US Headlining Tour

2.12 – Oakland, CA – The Stork Club

2.13 – Santa Cruz, CA – The Crepe Place

2.26 – Milwaukee, WI – Cactus Club

2.27 – Chicago, IL – Hideout

2.28 – Evanston, IL – SPACE

CREDITS

Vocals – Jonny Fritz

Composer – Andrew Conrad

Christine Tavolacci – Piccolo, Flute, Alto Flute

Michael Mull – Clarinet, Alto Sax

Andrew Conrad – Clarinet, Tenor Sax

Brian Walsh – Bass Clarinet, Bari Sax

Recorded, mixed and mastered by Kevin Ratterman live in Alhambra, CA 

All songs written by Jonny Fritz except

“Hot Chicken Condos”, written by Jonny Fritz, Jordan Lehning and Skylar Wilson and

“Slow Down”, written by Jonny Fritz, Tim Deaux and Robert Ellis 

Artist Links

Instagram | Facebook | Youtube | Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple Music

There’s nothing flashy about the way Muriel Grossmann approaches “Plays the Music of McCoy Tyner and the Grateful Dead.” The record doesn’t announce itself as a bold idea or a clever pairing. It just starts moving, slowly and deliberately, and trusts the listener to follow. In an era where genre-blurring is often framed as innovation, Grossmann’s album feels almost anti-conceptual. It sounds like music made by musicians who already know where the overlaps live.

Grossmann treats the source material less like repertoire and more like terrain. The Tyner compositions and the Grateful Dead tracks aren’t dressed up or stripped down. They’re allowed to breathe, stretch, and repeat until their internal logic becomes clear. The focus stays on feel rather than form, on how long a groove can hold before it needs to change.

Her saxophone playing is central but unassuming. Lines are patient, often circling the same ideas instead of chasing resolution. There’s a physicality to the sound that suggests endurance rather than urgency, as if the goal is to stay inside the music for as long as possible. Virtuosity never becomes the point, which gives the record its sense of trust and ease.

The band moves as a unit. Guitar parts blur into rhythm, organ tones hover and thicken the air, and the drums keep everything grounded without pinning it down. The interplay feels conversational rather than reactive, built on shared time instead of constant response. Nothing feels rushed, and nothing feels ornamental.

“Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” sets the tone early, riding a steady pulse that accumulates weight through repetition. “Contemplation” pulls inward, leaving space between notes and letting silence do some of the work. Both performances reflect a respect for the originals without sounding beholden to them.

The Grateful Dead selections slide into place without friction. “The Music Never Stopped” becomes a circular groove rather than a sing-along, while “The Other One” leans fully into its open-ended nature. These pieces feel less like covers than familiar shapes viewed from a different distance.

What makes “Plays the Music of McCoy Tyner and the Grateful Dead” compelling is its refusal to sell itself. Grossmann isn’t interested in explaining why this combination works. She lets repetition, collective focus, and long-form listening make the case. The album unfolds at its own pace, rewarding attention without demanding it, and leaves behind the feeling that these musical paths were always running alongside each other.

On the surface, McCoy Tyner and the Grateful Dead appear to come from different galaxies. But listen deeply, and it becomes clear: they were orbiting the same planet. 

Weir metabolized Tyner’s harmonic density, left-hand power, and asymmetrical swing into a singular rhythm guitar language. Listen to “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” from Tyner’s Enlightenment (1973), then compare it to a long jam on “The Other One”—say, 5/10/72 from the Europe ’72 box. That centerless gravity, that rolling churn? Different instruments, same engine. It would be easy to present this as a concept album. Tyner meets the Dead. Jazz meets jam. Two cultures, one filter. But that’s not what’s happening here. 

Muriel Grossmann’s project is a continuation: tracing Tyner’s influence as it threads through Weir and onward, then using it as an invitation to explore these compositions anew. Joined by Radomir Milojkovic on guitar, Abel Boquera on Hammond B3 organ, and Uros Stamenkovic on drums, she treats these four works not as artifacts to preserve, but as invitations to explore. 

“We played this music using a sort of filter,” she says, “so it sounds like when I compose, record, and perform our own music. It’s somebody else’s music, but it sounds like our music.” — Muriel Grossmann, 2025 

Plays the Music of McCoy Tyner and Grateful Dead is out TODAY Muriel’s label Dreamland Records, Dec 29, 2025.

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