Mike Richmond
Balancing humor with poignancy and country with folk, country, and blues, Without An Audience adds a compelling new chapter to Mike Richmond’s storied music career. As a co-founder of Athens, GA’s art rockers Love Tractor, he was part of the whirlwind musical scene that made the college town ground zero for ’80s indie rock, along with friends/fellow artists The B-52s, R.E.M., Pylon and more. (Love Tractor’s highly regarded album Themes From Venus, noted for pairing jangle pop with electronic and ambient sound, was praised on its 2022 remastered reissue.) Now, with the aid of some of some Athens, GA’s finest musicians, Richmond will release Without An Audience, his first solo album, on June 12, 2026. Today, the album’s first single, “Small Southern Towns,” is out on all streaming services.
LISTEN TO “SMALL SOUTHERN TOWNS” | STREAM / PURCHASE HERE
PRE-SAVE WITHOUT AN AUDIENCE HERE | ORDER CDS AND VINYL HERE
“I was asking myself, why am I writing these songs? Is anyone going to care?,” Richmond says. “I’m an old guy who played in a pretty obscure band back in the ‘80s—does anyone want to hear my new stuff? But I’m fascinated by people like William Blake, Van Gogh, Nick Drake and others who did what they did and never got a lot of applause for it. So I kept writing and recording, and I started to grow more confident in my mission.”
Hence the album title, Without An Audience. On the first single, “Small Southern Towns,” Richmond maps what Flannery O’Connor called the “Christ-haunted landscape” of the region, with stops at Rowan Oaks in Oxford, and Elvis’ birthplace in Tupelo. With the rhythm section counting the highway lines, the pedal steel tracing the line of the horizon, and Richmond’s voice soaring into his falsetto, the song celebrates the people who make art in those out-of-the-way places.
“When my girlfriend and I travel, usually up to North Carolina or over to Birmingham to see family, we don’t like to take the interstate. We like to drive through the back roads, and we love to see those small towns and old houses and historic districts. I wrote that song as a love letter to those parts of the South and to southern artists like Gram Parsons, Robert Johnson, and William Faulkner.”
The album was recorded over time at Matt Tamisin’s Japanski Studios in Athens, with Richmond recording his vocal and guitar tracks. Then he brought in friends to flesh them out, including drummer Joe Rowe (the Glands), bassist David Barbe (Mercyland, Sugar), pedal steel maestro John Neff (Japancakes, Drive-By Truckers), fiddler Adam Poulin (Grassland String Band), Ben Hackett (New Madrid), Jason NeSmith (Pylon Reenactment Society) and Neil Rosenbaum. Together they crafted a dramatic score for Richmond’s songs, sometimes taking them off into new directions but always underscoring his love of country, blues, and early rock and roll.
“It may sound funny, but Athens feels like a member of the band on this record. This place is a huge part of my music,” he says. “There’s something very satisfying about making a record. A lot of people—just regular folks—do a lot of things and never get applause for it, never find fortune or fame, but they still do it because it’s life and you need to dosomething. If you’re a good person, then you want to do something good.”
