With Wesley Stace’s John Wesley Harding, Wesley Stace wants everyone to know that he is the artist formerly known as John Wesley Harding. While he may have, “broken up the band,” he is joined by The Jayhawks on his new album and together they deliver some fantastic songs including “Better Tell No One Your Dreams,” “Let’s Evaporate,” and “You’re A Song.”

The singer formerly known as John Wesley Harding returns to his birth name with a new album that doubles as a stealth return effort by the Jayhawks as it features the band’s core lineup – Gary Louris, Marc Perlman, Tim O’Reagan and Karen Grotberg – backing up each song, including Let’s Evaporate, the album’s first single.

The album features 12 tracks chosen for these sessions by Stace, who says, “I always have a lot of songs, so I listened to every unused song I had, many of them quite recent, and picked 11 that I thought The Jayhawks (or The Wezhawks, as we started to call it) would sound great on. I also included a cover, “Don’t Turn Me Loose,” which is where the idea of our making a record together had originated: I saw them live and thought they’d sound great playing that song, and then I thought: and I should be singing it! And they liked the idea. And we did these twelve songs, and that’s it. Everything we recorded is on the record. No outtakes.”