Some musicians make records. Some make a life. Pierce Edens spent twenty years doing both: playing the regional circuit, loading the van, writing songs in the hours between, and building a career out of Western North Carolina without loans, without shortcuts, and without anyone’s permission.
Happy, Lonesome, and Free reads like the liner notes those records never had room for. Each of its seven chapters is centered on a record and the life being lived around it, from the first two hundred CDs pressed and sold out of a DIY studio next to a welding shop in Marshall, North Carolina, to the Sesame Street cover that closes his most recent album.
It is the story of The Dirty Work, the band that carried these songs into rooms that filled and rooms that didn’t, and of the two-piece with Kevin Reese that grew out of it. And it is the story of Madison County, with its French Broad River, hollers, and ridgelines. It’s about what it means to leave a place, carry it with you across thirty-nine states, and find your way back to it every time.
The book also contains the complete lyrics to every song in the Pierce Edens catalog, collected in one volume for the first time. Photographs run throughout, among them a tintype portrait of Pierce and Kevin by Sarah Jones Decker. She took it in the weeks after Hurricane Helene, with the two of them standing in front of freshly replaced train tracks and mud still piled high alongside them.
Coming December 2026.
