The first song off the album, “Tommy McLain Testimony,” is available to stream! Stream here. 

In 2003, Swamp Pop pioneer Tommy McLain self-released his album Moving to Heaven. An extremely rare piece of Louisiana music history, Moving to Heaven only existed as a CD that Tommy himself pressed 500 copies of more than two decades ago. Tommy sold the CDs at his shows on the bayou and that was the only place to purchase this mysterious album. Featuring extremely DIY production techniques and spooky synthesizer sounds, this was Tommy McLain at his most raw and spiritual. Tommy wrote every song and plays every instrument on Moving to Heaven as he vocalizes about life, death and forgiveness.

Many years later, Elvis Costello found a CD of Moving to Heaven in a Louisiana record store and fell in love with the music. Costello was a fan of Tommy ever since hearing him back in the ‘70s on the compilation Another Saturday Night, but he knew that Moving to Heaven was something special. Costello and Tommy would eventually meet in 2010 at a Bobby Charles tribute concert where Costello professed his love of Moving to Heaven to Tommy in-person. “I would go to local, secondhand record shops looking for albums by people like Tommy McLain,” Costello told the New York Times in 2022.

2022 was a banner year for McLain who released his first commercial album in four decades, I Ran Down Every Dream, on Yep Roc Records. The campaign saw McLain headlining New Orleans JazzFest, performing on the Late Late Show with James Corden, and charting at Billboard for the first time since the 1960s. With a new worldwide audience paying attention to Tommy, a renewed interest in this long-lost 2003 album Moving to Heaven continues to grow. With the album being out-of-print for two decades with no way of listening to the album online, fans and music historians alike feared that Moving to Heaven was lost to time.