Audiopile Review: Since the dissolution of ambient post-rock legends Labradford in the early 2000s, Mark Nelson has made loads of excellent albums as Pan American. What started out as a more electronically inclined side project has blossomed into a formidable back catalogue. If we’re honest, for us, little of it has ever reached the heights of peak Labradford. Not enough guitars, maybe. That’s why, ‘New World, Lonely Ride’, a new collaboration between Nelson and pedal steel maestro Michael Grigoni is so exciting. Nelson plays guitar, mandolin, and synthesizer, and the results are looser and more organic than you might expect from a Pan American album. Played rather than programmed. We’re in ambient Americana country here. Long roads, big skies, wide-open vistas, ghost towns, and broken dreams. Fans of Bill Frisell and Ry Cooder will find a lot to enjoy here, and Labradford fans will get a glimpse of a what a version of that group may have evolved into. ‘New World, Lonely Ride’ is certainly surprising, but it’s a long, lonely way from disappointing. It sits at a new high point in Nelson’s discography and gazes into the distance, wondering: “What’s next?”

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Michael Grigoni and Pan•American present their first collaboration. The album’s title, New World, Lonely Ride, gestures toward its meditative orientation. The duo offers a series of reflections on the zeitgeist of our present moment, the spirit of our age: the isolation and loneliness that continues to echo in the wake of the pandemic; the fractures that mar our political discourse; the uncertainty that has stamped itself on the future of democracy. The vast geography of America and the absence of a common ground, a shared political vision, have contributed to the affective landscape of contemporary American life—of what it feels like to live in the United States today.

Using instrumental voices and textures drawn from the traditional American forms of folk, country, bluegrass and blues, and informed with a modern sense of ambience and space, the sound is both contemporary and deeply rooted. With New World, Lonely Ride, Grigoni and Pan American join countless American artists who have drawn upon this landscape—physical and affective—giving it a voice and shape, listening to its character. And in starting there, with listening, offer a response for the future.