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August 5, 2025Aug 5

The fourth single release for "West Texas Heaven Revisted" project. It's special because it has the never before heard Townes Van Zandt outtake from the original sessions! is available for streaming now at this link!!! > https://found.ee/kimmierhodes_westtexasheavenrevisited

Here is the story of that session from my memoir songbook West Texas Heaven Revisited which makes hearing it even more special!

I was in Nashville to record a couple of songs with Waylon Jennings. Joe Gracey and I bumped into Townes Van Zandt at a bar and I popped off without thinking and said, “Hey Townes! Why don’t you come record a song at Cowboy’s studio with us tomorrow?” He agreed and it was then that I realized I had just asked the Shakespeare of my generation, my hero, to record a song that I had written, except that I had no idea which song! I decided on “I’m Gonna Fly” because I thought the poetry of the lyric was my best shot at having anything like Townes would write or sing. Townes showed up in a very fragile state the next day and kept stopping to cry while we recorded the song because it struck a nerve in him. I was happy that he liked the song but sad because I was pretty sure we weren’t getting a vocal we could actually use. When we later listened to the playbacks, I realized that every note of both tracks was soulful and beautiful. We had to choose so we finally picked one and released it on the album. Now for the re-release of the “West Texas Heaven” album I have a chance to use the outtake I have always loved and am so happy that his fans will have a chance to hear it, howbeit posthumous. I have no way of knowing but I’ve been told that was the last released recording Townes ever did. He died a few months later leaving me with the memory of a timeless moment where when filtered through the guy that was Townes Van Zandt, I sat there fully understanding my own lyric, about how a “heart can only make one sound like a whippoorwill in the midnight.”