Nashville based singer songwriter Rayland Baxter has released a new single, “Bolly Plateau,” alongside an official music video filmed on location at the Tennessee hilltop that gives the song its name.

It is the third track to surface from his forthcoming album True Violet, due 23 October via ATO Records.

The song returns Baxter to the physical place where much of the album was written, grounding its emotional journey in real ground. “I refer to the hilltop on which I live as Bolly Plateau, my little cabin at the near end of a dead end street,” says Baxter.

He describes the quiet of the place as central to how the songs came together. “It’s quiet up here. I wave to my neighbors and keep to myself, just like everyone else. And I go through the emotions mostly alone up here. Looking out to the street, I reminisce and I feel everything on Bolly Plateau,” he says.

“I sure am grateful to have this place. I write here and I dream here and I take it all in the best way I know how. Lately the reminiscing I’ve been doing is mostly focused on the last 5 years of my life and my transformation,” Baxter adds.

True Violet is co-produced by Nick Waterhouse and Paul Butler, and captures what Baxter describes as a slow, steady metamorphosis into someone new.

“Bolly Plateau” follows two earlier singles from the record, “The Fool,” and opening track “Better Man,” the latter co-written with, and featuring background vocals from, Tyler Ballgame.

The years around Baxter’s 2022 album If I Were A Butterfly were difficult ones. He toured heavily while navigating difficult relationships, personal loss and the death of his father, Bucky Baxter, a multi-instrumentalist best known for his work with Bob Dylan and as a member of Steve Earle and The Dukes.

His father had shaped every previous chapter of his career, and losing him left a gap that touring alone could not fill.

Returning to his quiet Tennessee hometown gave Baxter the stillness to confront patterns and emotions he had spent years outrunning, and a conversation with his sister encouraged him to dig deeper into the writing.

The result was prolific. Baxter wrote around 70 songs over a years long period of solitude, and True Violet slowly took shape from that pile as a sweeping, tender and sometimes raucous record about reckoning and reconciliation.

Rayland Baxter has built his reputation on records that blend soul, psychedelia and classic songwriting, and True Violet marks a new chapter after several years shaped by touring and personal upheaval. The album traces a path from that difficult period toward something steadier.

Though the writing was a solitary process, making the record became something else entirely, a story of friendship, family and collaboration.

Recording was punctuated by moments of doubt, scrapped songs, trips back to the drawing board and calls to friends for help. Fittingly, Baxter left the sequencing of True Violet to his friend Shakey Graves, also known as Alejandro Rose-Garcia.

These days, Baxter says he has a steadier hand on the sails of his life, and it comes through in his voice as he sings about living inside a feeling for too long, and the hard won relief of finally moving beyond it.

True Violet is about what remains once the storm passes: the lessons, the scars, the gratitude, and the possibility of starting again. Its power lies in the contrast between the hardship that inspired it and the clarity, patience and community that eventually brought it into focus.

“Bolly Plateau” is out now, and the official video can be watched online. True Violet is set for release on 23 October via ATO Records.

Rayland Baxter True Violet Tracklisting:

1. Better Man
2. Up and Down a Mountain
3. Bad Love
4. Haymaker
5. What a Day My Friend
6. The Fool
7. Bolly Plateau
8. Real Bad Rut
9. Dreamin About
10. Never Do
11. Oh My Love