Album Review – Myron Elkins – “Nostalgia For Sale”

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Americana (#570) and Country Soul (#577) on the Country DDS.

Some music you listen to. Other music you feel. With some music, you acknowledge the cosplay, but voluntarily suspend disbelief, and listen along anyway. With other music, you close your eyes, lose yourself in the experience, and are completely uninterested in any arguments about authenticity, transfixed by the spellbinding experience ushering you away from everyday mundanity.

Myron Elkins opens his mouth, and a wormhole appears to a smoky nightclub in blue collar Detroit in the 1970s, or a Muscle Shoals recording session pre air conditioning installation. It’s borderline unbelievable what you’re hearing coming out of your speakers. But boy do you love every ounce of it.

Myron Elkins is too damn young to sound this damn old, or to be this damn good. When he released his debut album Factories, Farms & Amphetamines in early 2023 and set the pace for the rest of the year, he was fresh-faced and only 21 years old. The album was produced by Dave Cobb, and still it didn’t seem to receive the attention it deserved. Saving Country Music lauded it and he did receive placement on the Yellowstone TV series, but that was about it.

Now Myron’s surprised released a new album called Nostalgia For Sale, and once again it brings to heel many of the other albums released this year, and once again pretty much everyone else is ignoring it. Myron’s own website hasn’t even been updated to reflect the new release. Nonetheless, if you’re in-the-know, you’re basking in the Myron Elkins greatness. It’s not even really a country album. It’s more a throwback soul record, only guilty of being country by association. But man is it good.


Myron Elkins might be the most distinctive singer of our era, and in any genre. It truly is incredible. He’s got the soul of a 74-year-old Black man. But as Elkins likes to underscore, he considers himself a songwriter first, and that comes through in Nostalgia for Sale. Even if he was a squeaker with imperfect pitch singing through his nose, the songs would still make this record remarkable. It’s how Elkins has the instincts to write to his vocal strengths, and then match mood and era to the sentiments to be shared.

The ensemble cast of fictional characters Myron Elkins creates for the song “Get Home,” while also capturing a sentiment most all of us feel universally is it pretty masterful pen stroke. “Testimony,” “God Bless The Rain,” and most all the songs on the album could make this a distinctive singer/songwriter record all on its own.

But unlike Myron’s debut album that was a guitar heavy affair—even if it still had a soulful, Southern rock element to it—Nostalgia For Sale is soul almost in its entirety with horns and keys all over it, and little if any growl from the guitar work. Does this style still fit Myron’s songs and voice? Absolutely. Is the sound a little less unique in the crowded “Americana” space where it seems like everyone wants to make a soul record these days in the Anderson East of it all? Yes it is.

But unlike so many of the blue-eyed soulsters out there right now, Myron Elkins has a voice and disposition that is suited to it, as opposed to simply being bored with country and wanting to do something different. It’s patently clear after a spin through Nostalgia for Sale that this is what Elkins was born to do, to write songs and then sing them with such soulful conviction, your attention can’t help be to succumb to the experience.

8.2/10

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