Marc Ribot

“Inspirational guitarist for Waits, Costello et al steps forward as a dusky singer-songwriter dispensing gnarled 2am wisdom in a variety of genres from desert blues to drum’n’ bass.” -Uncut Magazine.

Marc Ribot released Map of a Blue City on May 23, 2025, via New West Records. The 9-song set was produced and mixed by Ben Greenberg based on original studio sessions produced by Hal Willner, as well as home recordings. Most renowned as a wildly inventive guitarist who has collaborated with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, John Zorn, Wilson Pickett, Marianne Faithfull, Caetano Veloso, Solomon Burke, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Neko Case, among many, many others, Map of a Blue City features Ribot’s imaginative playing and leads to what may be his definitive statement as an instrumentalist, as a songwriter, and even as a singer. While it’s not a traditional singer-songwriter album, it is his first to center his plaintive, wise voice quite so prominently throughout. Map of a Blue City showcases songs colliding disparate traditions: roots, bossa nova, no wave, noise, free jazz, and sounds that have no genre associations. Mostly featuring original compositions, the collection includes Ribot’s rendition of the Carter Family’s “When the World’s on Fire” as well as his treatment of Allen Ginsberg’s 1949 poem, “Sometime Jailhouse Blues.”

Marc Ribot has been living with Map of a Blue City for nearly thirty years. He wrote some of the songs in the 1990s and made home recordings that were all the more intimate and immediate for being so lo-fi. Other projects demanded his attention, but he never really abandoned the album. The songs just wouldn’t leave him alone. He says, “I just had an affection for them, so I never forgot about them. I wasn’t working on them constantly, but every once in a while, I would take another lunge at finishing them.

Map of a Blue City ruminated on what it means to be lost—the confusion and fear, of course, but also the excitement of so many undreamt-of possibilities. Its history is an odd map of its own, full of false starts, blind alleys, and dead ends. The album bears the weight of its history gracefully, incorporating recordings made over nearly half of his life and reflecting on how he got to this particular moment. “Working on this album for so long, I’ve seen the world change dramatically and not really change at all. Some of the issues today are the same ones I thought about when I was just starting the album, but some are things I couldn’t have dreamt of at the time. But I think that’s why I was so determined to get the production values right. Recording production is really complicated, but it all boils down to what kind of room the listener feels they’re standing in. There are some hard truths and cold observations in these songs. I wanted the room to be small enough so that we couldn’t turn away; but warm enough to feel like you’re hearing it from a friend.”