Parallel

Album: Songs To Keep You Warm (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • Fronted by Cleto Cordero, Flatland Cavalry is a country band that formed in Lubbock, Texas, in 2012. Since then, they've done a lot of touring to build their fanbase and promote their albums. But being on the road away from loved ones is a lonely experience, which Cordero relates on "Parallel," a duet with Ashley Monroe.

    In a 2022 Songfacts interview, he described the tune as a love story about being connected to somebody across time and space. It's a subject close to his heart, considering he and his wife, singer Kaitlin Butts, are often separated when their careers take them in different directions.

    "She literally has the same dream that I have," Cordero elaborated in a Wide Open Country interview. "She knows that I'm out here working and not messing around because we're both doing the same thing. It's given us a lot of empathy toward one another and makes it that much sweeter when we are able to be together in the same place."
  • Ashley Monroe is a member of the country trio Pistol Annies with Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley. She met with Flatland Cavalry as a songwriter, and when she hit it off in the writing room with Cordero, he asked her to sing on this.
  • After venturing out of their native West Texas to record their third album, Welcome To Countryland, in Nashville with producer Jake Gear, Flatland Cavalry went back home to cut Songs To Keep You Warm with fellow Texan Bruce Robison at the helm. Robison, the songwriter behind the Dixie Chicks' "Travelin' Soldier" and Tim McGraw and Faith Hill's "Angry All The Time," brought a note of warmth to an EP destined for chilly fall weather during their sessions at The Bunker in Lockhart, Texas.

    "I freaking love the way that studio sounds," Cordero told The Boot. "It's so pure and warm."

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