About the Artist
Lance Cowan spent close to four decades in Nashville as a publicist for some of the most respected songwriters in American music, among them Joe Ely, Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith, and New Grass Revival. For most of that run, almost none of his clients knew he wrote songs of his own. He kept a hard line between the publicist in the room and the writer at home, unwilling to look like he was building a name off the artists he represented. Now he is three records into a late creative chapter, with a new album, The Air That You Breathe, out July 24, 2026.
Lance Cowan
About the Episode (Episode 140)
Lance Cowan: The Publicist Who Finally Pitched Himself
Jason English talks with Lance a few months after the two met at the Opelika Songwriters Festival, in a stretch where a man who waited most of his life to make a record is now putting one out every year. The pull in this conversation sits between the guy who spent decades pitching everybody else and the writer who finally decided his own songs could stand next to the people he represented.
Key Conversation Points
The bar he set for himself: A night at the Bluebird watching the best writers in town changed how he measured his own work. "My competition was not the guy I was spending Saturdays playing with," he tells Jason. He set the bar at Jackson Browne and Bob Dylan and started studying the craft like the journalist he used to be.
A song he held for years: After Janis Ian heard him play one night, she pulled him into a co-write. She lifted one of his lines, "The numbers on her wrist were her new name," into a song of her own, and the one they wrote together sat unrecorded for a long time before it found a home on the new album.
A reckoning with faith: Raised Southern Baptist in Kentucky, Lance spent the last decade pulling apart what he was taught. The opening song on the record puts it plainly: "More questions than answers linger in my head."
The new record is out now. Watch the full conversation below.