Bland Halen
Seeing an idol perform in concert can be an incredibly life-affirming experience, particularly for those who also play music, stirring creative juices, reminding one of their purpose, and even going so far as to inspire tribute.
Such is the case for songwriter Austin Harris and the Lazy Horse players, who were moved to pay their respects to Neil Young and Crazy Horse after seeing them live in Alpharetta in 2024. The gang of four, which includes Harris’s former Grand Vapids bandmate McKendrick Bearden, former Arbor Labor Union drummer Ben Salie, and producer/multi-instrumentalist Ben Hackett, went on to play a handful of gigs over the course of the next year with a setlist that comprised covers of the legendary Canadian guitarist’s heaviest hitters. The band’s chemistry grew so robust that Harris felt it was only fitting for the group to back his latest batch of solo songs under the Bland Halen moniker on record.
Where 2024’s Let Me Sing to You Now About How People Turn into Other Things unpacked the fallout from a relationship’s end in relative isolation, Harris’s second release, Diamonds in My Mind, looks forward from more solid yet still troubled ground. Harris continues to try and make sense of and accept the things he can’t change, with Lazy Horse providing a fuller palette to help paint his preoccupations.
Recorded to 1-inch 8-track tape in 2025 with producer/engineer David Barbe at Athens’ Chase Park Transduction, Harris’s latest album finds the songwriter balancing Lazy Horse’s fuzzy guitar workouts with more distilled arrangements that incorporate less rock-oriented instrumentation.
Take for example the delicate opener “Forever,” which backs light acoustic guitar strums with intentional piano chords before the record jumps to “Troubles Running Down,” a heater that wakes the listener with sharp electric guitar distortion and a blistering solo. Elsewhere, Hackett, whose Songs for Sleeping Dogs project Harris has also helped bring to life in a live setting, adds clarinet to the album’s closer, “A Picnic in Inman Park,” alongside Bearden’s electric piano and Marta Kelleher’s cello to add a deceptively lighthearted flare to a song about heartbreak and longing.
Regardless of the the scope of any particular arrangement, with the technical limitations of recording to analog tape, each song feels deliberate, their strengths accentuated and excesses trimmed. Not sparse. Not bloated. Just right.
Diamonds in My Mind is set to be released on April 2026.