Exebelle release 'After All This Time'

Listen: "Share It With You"

Released December 22, 2017, After All This Time — the newest project by the Richmond-based alt-country band Exebelle — is proof that there is strength in numbers.

A fixture of Richmond's roots-rock community for more than a decade, Exebelle formed in 2007.  Co-founders Phil Heesen III and Chris Wright first bonded over their mutual love of Whiskeytown, the ramshackle alt-country band fronted by Ryan Adams during the late-Nineties.  That sound — a blend of guitar grit, stacked harmonies, swooning pedal steel and Southern twang — has remained the foundation of Exebelle's sound ever since, although the band shows the full range of its abilities with After All This Time.

A double album that was written, recorded, and mixed in Richmond, After All This Time offers up plenty of roadhouse roots-rock, bar-band country, and singer/songwriter folk music.  There's even some prog-rock tossed into the mix — a result not only of the band's appreciation for bands like Rush and Yes, but also the self-described "music school tricks" of Heesen, who graduated from Berklee College of Music.  Cinematic, anthemic, and always engaging, this is an album that avoids the predictabilities of Americana music — a genre that was still in its infancy when Exebelle had its first rehearsals in 2007 — and chases its own weird, wild muse.

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The album title is a loaded one.  During the six years it took to craft and record After All This Time, the band went through significant changes.  Members came and went.  Some started families.  Some battled addiction and emerged with a clean, sober outlook.  The result is an album that tackles a full range of topics — non-fiction, fantasy, war, love, apathy, and the dangerous comfort of a barstool — from multiple perspectives, with several bandmates (both past and present) contributing to the songwriting process.

"All of the things that went wrong in the past have lead us to exactly where we are, for the better," says lead guitarist Heesen, who shares frontman duties with Kerry Hutcherson, Ben Willson, and Ryan Owenby throughout the record.  "The album took all of this time for a reason, whatever it may be.  And we end up with something that we are proud of, scars and all."

Independently created and released, After All This Time is the band's first full-length album, arriving after five EPs that each showcased a different incarnation of an ever-evolving group.  After All This Time captures that full evolution in one tracklist, functioning as a time-lapse shot of a working band that, after all this time, has found its peak.

​Track Listing:

Disc 1
1. City Limits
2. Jimmy & Jean
3. The Long Pour
4. Something Worth Running For
5. Sam Hill
6. The Lullaby Of The Lexington Line
7. Fear
8. Share It With You
9. The Bandit Life


Disc 2
1. Stay Away
2. Kings, Queens, Princes & Thieves
3. You Have It Good
4. Over/Under
5. The Wanderer
6. Lonely Town
7. Somewhere Off In The Distance
8. Diggin’ Trenches
9. Sherwood Forest
10. Stay Away (Reprise)

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