Upon the release of their newest album, Union Made, the legendary Old Crow Medicine Show lit up the Louisville Palace on June 28. Bassist Morgan Jahnig dives into how the newest album came to be, what message the band wants to spread to their crowds, and their long history with Louisville, includin g their frequent stops to the beloved ear X-tacy. LEO: Tell me a little bit about how your newest album, Union Made came into fruition. MJ: Whenever we get ready to make an album, there’s always a certain amount of, you know, what kind of album is it going to be, what kind of songs do we want to put in it. As we are approaching the 250th anniversary of our nation, we thought, you know, that’s actually pretty good, those are some pretty good guardrails to have. So we basically looked at all the songs that Ketch [Secor] was writing and just said ‘Oh okay, this makes sense for this record. You know, this might need a little bit of rewriting to make it a little bit more sense.’Everything really just had to do with either the history of our country, how we see it, or how we would like to see it. LEO: So I know you guys started the tour before the album dropped. Did you have to make any changes to the lineup or how did you go about that with the album dropping during the tour? MJ: Well, the lineup seems to change on its own without much help from us. I think that just like anything that we do, anything we get to play, we’re fortunate to have such talented people in the band and know such great people who can come in and step in at a moment’s notice that anything we do can kind of live alongside anything else that we’ve always done.  So when we looked at what a 2026 tour was gonna look and sound like, we invited our very good friend Willie Watson to come back and help round out the sound for us and get the vocals all goosed up and juiced up. We started trickling the songs in from the album to get an idea of how people were going to react to it, how it was going to fit into the show, and it slotted. They all slotted in like they’ve been there the whole time. LEO: What would be your favorite song to perform from the new album? Do you have any in particular when you were writing them that you thought this is going to be really cool versus actually performing them. Can you tell me a little about that? MJ: Sure, you know, one of the songs that I’m so excited that’s on this album is the song Last American Waltz. This was actually a song that Ketch wrote almost 15 years ago. It was one of the ones that we had started working on for our album Remedy and ultimately it didn’t make it on that album, didn’t really fit with those songs that we were working on, but I always loved it. When it came time to make a record about America, Last American Waltz was high on my list. It’s one that I think about all the time. I would play the demo of it that we made from time to time because I just loved it so much, and to be able to really make that song sound the way that it always sounded in my head and get to play it for everybody every night. I have a ball playing that song. LEO: That’s a really cool concept to be able to revisit and still be able to bring it into fruition.  MJ: Ketch is such a prolific songwriter. Every time we make an album, we’ve usually got about 50 songs that we’ve got to sift through to find the 12 that we’re going to put on the album. So there’s always stuff that makes it you know, and there’s really good songs that never make it on albums. So to be able to go back into the Ketch Secor songbook and pluck out some gems that we always wanted to see the light of day but never did, I love doing that. And then once that happens, Ketch might think ‘Oh you know what? This is a song that I had started toying with. I think I’ll finish that because I think that’ll go really well here.’ So it’s a reciprocal process. LEO: With the political divide that we’re seeing right now in our country, what would be the tone you are trying to convey with this album? I know it’s a celebratory thing, knowing that we have completed 250 years, but what would you say the overall tone and message is for the album and tour?  MJ: When you’ve traveled as much as we have, we’ve been this band in specific for about 28 years, so we’re coming up on 30 years of being a band, we’ve played in 49 of 50 states, you know, in all different parts of each state. We’ve toured in different countries and I think that one thing that ties us all together is that the people are there to have fun and be happy. That’s the general goal of music is to unite people. I think that the differences that we have or that we perceive that we have are so far secondary to the common things that we share, and I think that a lot of these songs talk about that. [The songs] talk about how this is an incredible country, but it can be better through unity, and it feels like that unity is the only thing missing. The united part of the United States. I think that when you’re listening to music, especially when you’re at a live show, you’re all standing there facing the same direction liking the same things, you know? One of the lines is, ‘we drink the same beer.’ It’s like everybody’s there to do the same thing and to agree on something, and the thing they’re agreeing on is music and that they’re there to enjoy themselves. We could take a little bit of that home with you and take it to your local bar and restaurant and meeting place, and make the unity grow. I think that would make so many things better, if we could just see how much more alike we are than we are different. LEO: So what’s it like collaborating with all the different artists on Union? Do you enjoy collaborating? MJ: We really enjoy doing that. I think we’ve done it a little bit in the past. When we did it in the past, it was kind of at the end of the project where we were like ‘Oh you know what? This would be cool if we had Sierra Ferrell on it.’ When Sierra had come in and said that she would come and sing, the whole song changed. The entire song got rewritten because she was going to be there. I think that kind of creativity is so much fun.  This record, we knew that there were people we wanted to work with, so we were going into it ahead of time like ‘Okay, this is going to be where Evan Felker sings, or oh we’re going to have Dell and Ronnie sing this verse, and Molly’s going to come in and sing.’ So it’s like we all knew what was coming and were able to plan around it. Every time someone comes in to lend their voice or their playing, it elevates everything that we do because we’re trying to prove that we deserve to have this person here singing with us or playing with us. It makes everybody better, you know, collaboration in the music world is something we didn’t get to do a lot early in our career, and I think we are making up for lost time. LEO: To round this out, we are going to tie it back to Louisville. Where have you all played in Louisville? Have you performed at The Palace before?  MJ: We have been playing in Louisville pretty much as long as we’ve been a band. In fact, this is an interesting tidbit of information, back when people used to buy records, we would get reporting from the different record shops and where things were selling, and our top 2 markets were San Francisco, California and Louisville. We did shows in stores and ear X-Tacy. We would always go there every time we were in town to snatch up some records.  We’ve done Forecastle and we did Bourbon and Beyond a couple years ago. We were so happy when we finally reached The Palace material. I remember Headliners was the biggest place we had played for awhile. That was like such an achievement to get there, but you know, when they let us into The Palace, I was like ‘Okay, we’ve arrived.’ WPFK have been such supporters of ours for the last 28 years. Louisville’s always supported us and so we’ve always loved coming back. The post Union Made- Old Crow Medicine Show’s Newest Drop appeared first on LEO Weekly | Louisville Eccentric Observer. ...read more read less