Jayhawks Take Care of 'Unfinished Business' With New Album

Although the Jayhawks released three albums after 'Tomorrow the Green Grass,' the Minneapolis alt-country band only recently recorded a proper follow-up to its 1995 opus, singer and guitarist Gary Louris tells Spinner.

That's right: After breaking up in 2005, the Jayhawks are back with a new album, due in the first half of 2011 -- the first time Louris and singer/bassist Mark Olson have recorded together in the Jayhawks since 1995.

"Our agenda was to make a record like the record that would have followed 'Tomorrow the Green Grass' if Olson had stayed in the band," Louris says.

Olson left after that album for a solo career, though he and Louris toured as a duo in 2005-06 and recorded the 2009 release 'Ready for the Flood' under their own names. For the new Jayhawks album, they convened in Minneapolis with bassist Marc Perlman, keyboardist Karen Grotberg and drummer Tim O'Reagan, who joined the band just as Olson was leaving.

"What's exciting this time around is that it's the first time we've really recorded with Olson and Tim O'Reagan, so now we have this thing where we have four singers," Louris says. "We've got a barbershop quartet going."

After a best-of anthology in 2009, 'Music From the North Country,' and the reissue last year of the band's self-titled 1986 debut, 1992's 'Hollywood Town Hall' and 'Tomorrow the Green Grass,' writing new songs for the Jayhawks seemed like a natural thing to do.

"It doesn't sound like a band that's desperate or tired," Louris says. "It sounds like a band that got off prematurely. I think we felt like we had some unfinished business."

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