Tommy Womack is a teller of quirkily poignant truths. His new album, Live a Little, is produced by Eric Ambel and will hit the streets in 2025.

He’s written songs like “A Cockroach After the Bomb,” “Comb-Over Blues,” and “I’m Never Gonna Be a Rock Star,” and lines like “I get real depressed and tell everybody/ That’s what makes me unique,” and “Too much month at the end of the Xanax.” He wrote a song called “Nice Day” that is sad and hilarious enough to stand toe-to-toe with fellow Kentuckian-turned-Nashvillian John Prine’s classics. He founded the ‘80s  college radio faves Government Cheese forty years ago this month.

He’s not a Big Mac, he’s dark chocolate . . . a bittersweet pleasure that wasn’t made for the masses. But those of us who get Tommy Womack will sit in a McDonald’s parking lot, close the car windows, turn the car stereo up to ridiculous levels, and sit and listen to a Tommy album until someone comes out of the pre-fab fast food building and tells us we have to either order a Big Mac or leave. Todd Snider, Jason Ringenberg, Will Kimbrough, Jimmy Buffett, David Olney, Marshall Chapman, Webb Wilder, and many others have crowded those parking lot spaces and left with tires screaming and the stereo set to punishing volumes.

Tommy Womack has been making records for almost forty years. He’s written three books. He’s been on national television via MTV, NBC, and CBS. He’s been a public triumph and a public screw-up, sometimes at the very same time. He’s battled disease and despair, and he broke four bones in an unfortunate meeting with a tractor trailer in Sonora, Kentucky. He’s played behind the beat and he’s played smack dab in the middle.

He owns up to all of this in ways that make people smile and cry, sometimes at the very same time.