“Hello, Franklin”, the new EP from Austin Cash, is out August 11th. The first single, “Franklin, King of the Beers,” is streaming now and pre-orders for cassette and limited edition lathe cut 10” records are live.

“Hello, Franklin” represents Austin’s first real stab at guitar soli / American Primitive, a style of unaccompanied fingerpicked guitar composition made popular by the legendary John Fahey and continued on by so many others. In Austin’s words, this collection of songs is all about solitude, reflection, and mechanical processing.  It’s mesmerizing technicality combined with pure distilled emotion, an accurate translation of late-pandemic life and its conflicted feelings to solo guitar. For those of you who have never dug into he genre, I can comfortably say that “Franklin, King of the Beers” is as good a place to start as any. It’s a beautiful song and we hope you dig it!

Our friends at Holler Country reviewed the track and are premiering the music video now! Check it out here. Here's a little excerpt written by Jof Owens:

"The first taste of Cash's forthcoming Hello, Franklin EP, ‘Franklin, King of the Beers’, is a haunting minimalist instrumental. Written over a long year and recorded in a night, the song translates the nameless experience of late-pandemic life to solo guitar.

Its taut melodic phrasing giving way to a looser jagged drone before it stumbles and begins to collapse in on itself. It’s beautiful in the same way loneliness is. Delicate and overwhelming, like a weighted blanket of sound pressing down on you and holding you perfectly still as it wraps itself around you.

With a sound indebted to John Fahey’s intricate finger-picking style and progenitors of the American Primitive style, Cash joins contemporaries like William Tyler and Hayden Pedigo, in shaking up the world of fingerstyle traditionalism with a refreshingly adventurous, almost punk spirit."