Five songs stripped to their bones — recorded live on a farmhouse porch outside Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee, with nothing between the band and the evening crickets but a pair of condenser microphones and the last hour of daylight.
Back Porch Sessions was born from a dare. After a sold-out run of club dates in Nashville, the band drove forty minutes south to a friend’s property and set up on the sagging wraparound porch. No click track, no headphones, no second takes. What the mics caught is what you hear.
Track Listing
- 01 — Tailgate Gospel (Porch Version) 4:12
- 02 — She Left the Porch Light On (Porch Version) 5:34
- 03 — Baptized in Rain 3:48
- 04 — County Line (Porch Version) 4:06
- 05 — Old Dog, New Dirt 3:55
Three of the five tracks are reimagined versions of Dust & Glory cuts. Without the full-band arrangement, the lyrics breathe differently — “Tailgate Gospel” trades its driving rhythm for a finger-picked waltz, and “County Line” becomes a conversation between Jake’s vocal and Tommy’s fiddle that reveals harmonies buried in the studio version.
You can hear a screen door creak on track four. We almost edited it out, then decided it belonged there more than anything we played.
Hank Dawson, upright bass
The two new songs — “Baptized in Rain” and “Old Dog, New Dirt” — arrived unplanned. Jake had been carrying the melodies around for months, and the porch felt like the right place to let them out for the first time. Both tracks have since become live staples, though the band has never tried to replicate the porch versions on stage.
Back Porch Sessions is the quietest thing the Outhouse Poets have released, and for a lot of fans, it’s the most honest. No amplifiers, no stage smoke — just four people playing songs in the last light of a Tennessee summer.
