Cass McCombs, the enigmatic veteran singer-songwriter, never seems to sit still for long, and he rarely does the things that people expect of him. In 2023, for instance, McCombs teamed up with a kindergarten-teacher friend to make an album of children's music. Last year, McCombs surprise-released Seed Cake On Leap Year, a record of previously unreleased recordings. A couple of months ago, McCombs and Jenny Lewis had a duet called "Big Mother" on the LA-wildfire fundraiser compilation Super Bloom. Now, McCombs as a new single, and he just played it on his Tiny Desk Concert.
Way back in the day, Cass McCombs was a local Baltimore hero, and I bet I saw him play rooms smaller than the Tiny Desk Studio at NPR's studio in Washington, not far from his old stomping grounds. In his 20th-anniversary piece on tthe Decemberists Picaresque last week, Larry Fitzmaurice wrote about a Decemberists show at New York's Webster Hall where the excitement around the group was palpable. I was at that show, too, and Cass McCombs was the opening act. I was like, "Damn, Cass is on the come-up." Now, nobody even thinks of him as a Baltimore artist anymore. He's moved around too much and become too difficult to pin down, and he's never associated himself with any particular scene. In the Tiny Desk performance, McCombs played a bunch of his older songs: "County Line," "Robin Egg Blue," the 2002 oldie "Opium Flower." He also kicked things off with "Priestess," the new single that he released today.
"Priestess" is a shaggy ode to a mysterious woman, and it's got lyrical references to Ella Fitzgerald and John Prine. It's got the particular off-kilter warmth that nobody does quite like McCombs. This time around, he sounds a bit like Destroyer, if Dan Bejar had grown up as a Laurel Canyon folkie. Below, check out "Priestess" and McCombs' Tiny Desk Concert.
"Priestess" is out now on Domino.
