When I call Gary Louris to discuss the Jayhawks’ 12th studio album, Sanctuary Park, his wife answers. It appears I’ve been given her number instead of his, as she explains before rattling off his digits. The mix-up makes sense: Since Louris and Stephanie Stevenson got married in 2020, she’s become intrinsic to the Jayhawks frontman’s creative process — not only inspiring songs, like on his 2025 solo album Dark Country, but becoming a de facto band member.
“A lot of this record is an ode to my wife, Stephanie,” Louris tells me when I finally get him on the phone. “We look at ourselves a little bit, not to sound too pretentious, as the new John and Yoko, because we’re inseparable. She’s such a huge part of everything I do. I wanted to write about our love.”
Named for a park in Dundas, Ontario, where rebellious Stephanie used to listen to the Clash, Sanctuary Park (out Aug. 28) delves into both of their childhoods, growing up and growing older, and Louris’ newfound home in rural Quebec. “It’s not just Stephanie’s story; there’s a lot of looking back on this record, on her story, on my own story,” he says. “Sanctuary Park could be anything. It could be a place of memories, it could be a place of regrets or hopes.”
Time folded in a way during the creation of this album, the followup to 2020’s gorgeous yet weather-worn XOXO. For this record, the band enlisted Canadian producer Bob Ezrin (Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd) to help guide the music. It had been more than 20 years since Louris worked with Ezrin, who helped add a poppy sheen to 2000’s Smile — a pivot from more rough-hewn Americana that turned off some fans and brought in lots of new ones.
“Bob and I have remained friends ever since we were together on Smile, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years,” Louris says. “We were also aware that Bob had just recently renounced his American citizenship in protest to the administration. In our conversation, it came up that we were making a record, and he just said, ‘I want to do it.’” That all worked out, because, Louris says, “It was kind of a Canadian story. I’m living in Canada, married to a Canadian citizen, a permanent resident, but I’m still an American citizen. I spent most of my life in the U.S. Living up here, I’ve soaked up a lot of what it’s like to be a Canadian, and funny enough, it’s not that much different than being a Minnesotan.”
In fact, Louris says, he didn’t grow up on the Americana that his band is often associated with. “We’re considered sort of an American band, but a lot of our influences as the Jayhawks were Canadian, like the Band, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell,” he says. “It’s still the Jayhawks. It’s not like all of a sudden we’re Canadian.”
Steve Cohen*
The team didn’t set out to make “Smile, Volume Two,” Louris says. First of all, things aren’t the way they were in 1999, when labels threw around money and sprang for lots of time in fancy studios. Instead, the band had 10 days in a Toronto studio. “In certain ways, it was a blessing, because it played to our strengths. It’s going to be more like, ‘This is a moment in time,’” Louris says. Ezrin was also dead-set on making the record sound alive. “There’s a feeling he’s picked up, being involved as he is in the music world — that people kind of starve for real music, music made by humans in a room together, feeding off each other’s synergy that happens when you all play together,” Louris says.
That energy is apparent from the first note of opener “Keeping Our Heads Above Water,” which was co-written with Mat Kearney in Nashville around 2012. Kicking off with upbeat gang vocals, the track tells the tale of the kind of love you only experience when your entire life is in front of you. “It’s a bit of a story of kids, young lovers, under the Friday night lights, trying to be adults, but still afraid of growing up,” Louris says.
Louris flirts with that kind of romance throughout the record, sometimes wondering what it would have been like if he’d met Stephanie as a kid. “She’s the rock & roller of our marriage. She was just more badass than I was growing up,” Louris says. “I was like the good boy: Went to school, got As, didn’t miss a class. She had more fun growing up.”
That comes through in “Hands Upon the Wheel,” a remake of his solo track “Blow ‘Em Away” that sees Louris promising to steal his daddy’s car and whisk his girl away. “When I made Dark Country, by necessity, I made it in my own studio. I didn’t have a lot of gear. It’s a very intimate record. Another album ode to my wife, Stephanie,” Louris says. “But I always felt there were a few songs on that record which could have also really benefited from a full-band experience and could sound good with the Jayhawks, so ‘Blow ‘Em Away’ became ‘Hands Upon the Wheel.’”
That said, it’s hard not to let the real world into your bubble sometimes. Take “American Midnight,” an elegy to a country in flames that the band just released as a single. “I’m very political and watch a lot of news. However, I find I don’t like writing about politics,” he says. “For one thing, they can become dated and irrelevant — and hopefully they will be. ‘American Midnight’ is more about viewing America from outside of America, and it’s not only what’s happening now, it’s about America’s collective personality over the years. There’s a love-hate relationship with the United States.”
The record doesn’t end on that dark note, though. It all culminates in “Rowing the Boat,” a sweetly simple, honeyed track that Louris initially wrote for Nickelodeon in 2020 (they didn’t use it). “I love to talk about that song because it’s one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written,” he says. “It was an answer song to ‘American Midnight.’ Everybody’s looking at their differences instead of what makes us the same. So, in a childlike way, ‘Rowing the Boat’ is all not looking at our differences. It’s a coda on the record, like ‘Goodnight’ on the White Album is Ringo singing a lullaby. ‘Rowing the Boat’ is also kind of like a lullaby. It felt right.”
