“We’ve all been fans of each other from the start,” says Jimmie Dale Gilmore, “but the thing that’s always struck me about The Flatlanders is that, first and foremost, it’s a band rooted in friendship. Beyond the music, we just connect with each other in these deep and personal ways, and that’s been a lifelong treasure.”

Take a listen to Treasure of Love, The Flatlanders’ first new album in more than a decade, and it’s clear that those bonds are deeper and stronger now than ever before. Completed during COVID-19 lockdowns with the help of longtime friend and collaborator Lloyd Maines, the record finds the iconic Texas trio of Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock in classic form, serving up a rollicking collection of twang-fueled, harmony-laden performances full of wry humor and raw heartbreak. While a few of the songs here are never-before-heard originals, the vast majority of the tracklist consists of vintage tunes the band picked up during their 50-year career, some stretching as far back as the group’s earliest performances in the honkytonks around Lubbock, TX, where you might have spotted Willie Nelson or Townes Van Zandt in the audience on any given night. These days, you may be more likely to find avowed fans like the Coen Brothers or David Byrne in the crowd, but the spirit of The Flatlanders remains the same: everything’s better with friends.

“Whenever the three of us get together, it all feels so fresh and exciting and unpredictable,” says Hancock. “Every time we collaborate, there’s this feeling of newness and possibility, even though it’s all a part of this same story we’ve been telling since the very beginning.”

For The Flatlanders, that story began back in the early 1970s, when Ely, Gilmore, and Hancock first came together for a string of performances and recording sessions that would go on to become the stuff of legend. Though the band was locally beloved at the time, national critics and radio largely ignored The Flatlanders, whose mix of country, folk, bluegrass, and rock and roll fell well outside of the mainstream, and by the end of 1973, the trio was already headed their own separate ways with little to show for their time together but an under-distributed debut released only on 8-track tape. In the decades to come, however, Ely, Gilmore, and Hancock would all go on to achieve considerable success as solo artists, and as their individual profiles grew, so too did the mythic status of The Flatlanders. Rumors, speculation, and bootlegs swirled until 1990, when Rounder Records reissued the group’s original recordings under the particularly fitting title More A Legend Than A Band. This time around, The Flatlanders received their due, with critics hailing them as visionaries and craftsmen of the highest caliber. With a sound that would lay much of the groundwork for the nascent Americana scene (The New York Times dubbed the band’s long-lost first album a “founding document of the alternative country movement”), the trio began collaborating and touring on and off again for the next thirty years, releasing a series of acclaimed studio albums in the 2000s that prompted Rolling Stone to hail them as “hippie-country pioneers” and NPR’s Mountain Stage to declare them “one of country-rock’s most influential bands.”

“A lot of groups our age are either dead or not speaking to each other anymore,” says Gilmore, “but I think part of the reason The Flatlanders are still together is that we’ve all had our own separate careers along the way. We’re all such strange individualists, but we can co-captain this ship together because every time we come back to it, we feel that same magic we felt when we first started playing together.”

It was that magic that inspired the band to record many of the covers that appear on Treasure of Love, revisiting songs they enjoyed playing from the early days and capturing them for the sheer joy of it. Not realizing at the time that they were actually making a record, the trio worked fast and loose in the studio, laying down raw, playful takes whenever they had free time between sessions or tours. It was only when the COVID-19

pandemic forced Ely, Gilmore, and Hancock to simultaneously clear all of their calendars that the band realized they had an album on their hands (and, just as importantly, the time to complete it).

“I like to say that this album evolved more than it was recorded,” says Ely, who hosted the initial recording sessions and worked extensively on the tracks at his Spur Studios in Austin. “We’d been chipping away at these songs for a while without ever really finishing anything, so when lockdown started, it seemed like the perfect time to really focus on it.”

Bringing the raw material to Lloyd Maines was an obvious next step for the trio, as the famed Texas producer and multi-instrumentalist—known for his work with The Chicks, Kris Kristofferson, Loretta Lynn, Jerry Jeff Walker, Wilco, Terry Allen, and countless others—had been a part of The Flatlanders’ orbit since before they were even a band. Maines had also worked with each member on their own solo projects over the years, as well, which made him particularly well suited to help finish their musical sentences and flesh out the recordings.

“Joe called and asked if I’d be interested in finishing out some Flatlanders tracks,” recalls Maines, who co-produced the record along with Ely and Ely’s wife, Sharon. “I told him that I was always interested in making some Flatlanders music. I added a lot of instruments and replaced a few things to make the songs sound complete, but the core of those tracks, the lead vocals by Joe and Jimmie and Butch, already sounded great. They gave me some stellar performances to work with.”

Those vocal performances—sometimes achingly lonely, sometimes slyly hilarious—are the heart and soul of Treasure of Love, which opens with the searing “Moanin’ Of The Midnight Train.” One of the few originals on the album (this one penned by Hancock), the song is lean and gritty, evoking the vast emptiness of the West Texas landscape in all its bittersweet beauty and isolation. Like much of the record, it’s utterly captivating, but it doesn’t fit neatly into any particular genre, weaving a broad swath of American musical traditions together into a singular whole. The band’s rueful take on “Long Time Gone,” first made famous by The Everly Brothers, mixes country waltzing and bluegrass harmonies, while their stately rendition of Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs To Me” splits the difference between Greenwich Village and Galveston, and the old-time blues tune “Sittin’ On Top Of The World” transforms into a rip-roaring rocker in their capable hands.

“I think we’ve been playing that song since the beginning of time,” Ely says with a laugh.

In fact, several of the tracks here were favorites of The Flatlanders in their original incarnation, including Leon Russell’s “She Smiles Like A River,” Mickey Newbury’s “Mobile Blues,” and Townes Van Zandt’s “Snowin’ On Raton.” But it’s perhaps the shuffling title track, originally written by George Jones and the Big Bopper, that encapsulates the record best, with Gilmore singing “Why should I worry what tomorrow will bring? / For the treasure of love, the treasure of love makes me a king.”

What the future holds in these strange, uncertain times is anybody’s guess, but for now, The Flatlanders have got each other, and that’s a treasure indeed.

 Written by Anthony D'Amato