Hillbilly Thomists Announce New Album
January 4, 2021
The group of folk singing Dominican friars, the Hillbilly Thomists, plan to soon release their new album! Available now at select Dominican parishes, the album will hit music streaming services in early 2021.
Recorded on location in a mountain retreat during the COVID-19 pandemic, the friars music proclaims a love for the deeper things, including bourbon, bluegrass, and the Bible.
The friars’ eponymous first album was a tremendous hit, reaching Billboard’s Top Ten Bluegrass Albums.
The new album, titled Living for the Other Side features new, original songs, composed and arranged by the friars. Fr. Justin Bolger, O.P., told Aleteia that the music is a proclamation of God’s love, experienced then shared. He says, “The way to be most alive is to have that greater view of life, a wise view, that our eternal home is in heaven.” For that reason the album focuses on heaven, with the goodness of God and the mercies to come as a source of our hope on this side of eternity.
A true labor of love, recording the album was a genuine fraternal project. The rhythms of religious life, meals and common prayers, contributed to the joy the brothers found during the recording project.
The Second Vatican Council teaches,,
“In the face of the modern development of the world, the number constantly swells of the people who raise the most basic questions or recognize them with a new sharpness: what is man? What is this sense of sorrow, of evil, of death, which continues to exist despite so much progress? What purpose have these victories purchased at so high a cost? What can man offer to society, what can he expect from it? What follows this earthly life?”
Gaudium et Spes
For its part, Living on the Other Side dares to grapple with these questions. Not in a scholarly article, nor a homiletic form, two media often used by friars in their preaching, but in this novel evangelical project. And despite the vibrant and original means, the argument is no less serious.
The album will soon be available for purchase on the Hillbilly Thomists website.
