A songwriter at the height of his craft closes out an extraordinary three-album journey through folk music’s most enduring themes From mortality and spiritual reckoning to systemic injustice and the quiet devastation of love lost, “Some More Folk” is a masterwork of lyrical depth and emotional precision Released June 30, 2026 via Swiss Cottage Recordz, with publishing by Unlimited Sounds LLC in conjunction with Budde Music and licensing by Audiosparx
When a songwriter reaches his 55th album, you might expect a certain comfort in repetition, a willingness to retread familiar ground. Paul Robert Thomas refuses that comfort entirely. Some More Folk, the third and final installment in his remarkable folk trilogy following Some Folk and More Folk, is the sound of an artist pushing himself to the very edge of the form he has chosen, wringing from ten tracks a range of emotional and philosophical territory that most songwriters couldn’t cover in a career. Released June 30, 2026 through London’s Swiss Cottage Recordz, with publishing by Studio City’s Unlimited Sounds LLC in conjunction with Budde Music and licensing by Audiosparx of Florida, the album stands as a genuinely historic achievement, and a deeply moving send-off to a chapter of Thomas’s creative life.
The album opens with “With Pockets Full of Stones”, a track that immediately signals Thomas’ intentions. The image of weighted pockets is one of folk music’s most fatalistic, historically tied to despair and self-erasure. Thomas takes that motif and turns it inside out. He grounds the opening in elemental crisis, a freezing storm, a missed train, the unmistakable geography of a psychological rock bottom, before pivoting to something far more interesting: the idea that the burdens we carry are precisely what connect us to one another. The shift from solitary suffering to a shared voyage on a “rocky boat” is achieved with the kind of lyrical sleight of hand that marks a master at work. It is an extraordinary way to begin an album, quietly defiant, stoically comforting.
“Not Long” follows, and the mood shifts into something almost ritualistic. Thomas approaches mortality here with a tranquility that is rare and disarming, reframing the end of life not as tragedy but as a necessary homecoming. The sudden intrusion of ancient, imperative language into the song’s calm creates a minimalist blueprint for the shedding of ego and physical form, and by weaving mythological imagery alongside genuine consolation for the grieving, Thomas achieves a lucid, rare grace. Death, in his hands, becomes cyclical and even beautiful.
“Unknown Child of God” is among the album’s most devastating moments. Paul Robert Thomas opens with the crushing reality of an anonymous boy existing briefly at the margins of a society that has failed him entirely. The emotional pivot comes when the child’s grieving father chooses organ donation, allowing his son’s heart to beat on inside another. What begins as an indictment of collective blindness transforms into a soaring universal anthem, and the image of a forgotten life carried by the four winds ensures this song lingers long after it ends.
The album’s quieter, more intimate register arrives with “What You Lose”, a piece of folk wisdom delivered with the campfire directness of a seasoned troubadour. Thomas strips away all commercial noise and builds to a single, egalitarian truth: we arrive in this world empty-handed, and we leave the same way. The song’s emotional peak, a fierce defense of human relationships as the one thing that truly matters, is a beautifully melancholic sermon on love’s irreplaceability.
“Just Take it Easy” offers a counterweight, a warm, conversational piece that functions as a folk remedy for modern anxiety. Thomas doesn’t philosophize or theorize his way toward calm. He simply maps, with clinical compassion, how internal panic radiates outward and damages the people closest to us, then prescribes the oldest medicine available: presence. It is the sound of a trusted friend talking you down, and it works precisely because Thomas never overcomplicates it.
“Lost in Manila” is a stunning left turn into gritty urban folk reportage. Paul Robert Thomas constructs a claustrophobic cityscape of systemic corruption and foreign exploitation, where the divine has apparently caught the last train out. The psychological core of the song rests on the shifting ritual of drinking San Miguel beer, first as a countdown to escape, then as the instrument of toxic complacency. The narrator’s defiance dissolves quietly into permanent resignation, and the effect is genuinely unsettling.
The emotional intensity deepens further with “For How Long”, an acoustic noir that dissects the inertia of a relationship in collapse. Thomas’s central metaphor, a drowning man whose rescue will only pull his partner under, is devastating in its precision. The imagery evolves from elemental isolation to industrial captivity, chains tightening, keys jangling, until a knock at the door signals the inevitable expiration of shared illusions. Driven by a relentless title refrain, it is one of the most emotionally honest pieces on the album.
“Armageddon’s Not Far Away” fuses planetary collapse with personal crisis of faith in ways that feel genuinely harrowing. Thomas paints a scorched-earth landscape of melting concrete and dried-up lakes, using the physical sensation of an over-fried tongue to mirror a suffocating psychological confinement. The song’s indictment of misplaced trust, in deceitful guides and dancing bishops awaiting salvation from above, lands with real bitterness. The closing image of a solitary bird perched on barbed wire on a borderless, exiled shore is among the album’s most indelible.
“Just Who’s Watching Our Kids” may be the most urgent song Thomas has ever recorded. Structurally moving from institutional corruption within a “Holy Room” to the modern horrors of online predation, Thomas demythologizes the perpetrator with chilling precision: ordinary people in smart shirts and ties, operating within lenient systems, weaponizing isolation to groom the vulnerable. The title refrain shifts gradually from sociopolitical interrogation to something closer to prayer, an insistent, rhythmic mandate for vigilance that refuses to let the listener look away.
And then, with “Say Bye, Bye, Bye”, Paul Robert Thomas offers one of the most charming and philosophically grounded album closers in recent memory. Mortality here is a blink-of-an-eye transition, nothing to fear. The song warns beautifully against spiritual stasis, against dying of thirst right beside the water, while championing presence and gratitude over the endless accumulation of things. That Thomas frames this as his farewell to the folk genre itself, perched metaphorically on an English oak before returning to blues-rock for his 56th album Alkebulan, gives the moment genuine meta-contextual weight. It is a rustic, charming, and deeply earned goodbye.
Some More Folk is, taken whole, a remarkable document. Paul Robert Thomas has used ten folk songs to cover grief and gratitude, systemic injustice and individual spiritual reckoning, ecological collapse and the quiet devastation of love coming undone. That he does so with such consistent lyrical precision and emotional intelligence, across a trilogy now complete, is an achievement the folk world should recognize loudly. The journey from Some Folk to here has been, by any measure, historic.
OFFICIAL LINKS:
Some More Folk’s album webpage – https://www.paullyrics.com/album/some-more-folk
http://www.youtube.com/paulie56il
https://lespaulsthepauls.bandcamp.com/music
