Article Contributed by Gratefulweb
Published on 2026-07-27
Blind Owl Records will release Flowers of Perennial Dissent, a new full-length mystic poetry album and accompanying chapbook by writer and folk musician Noah C. Lekas, on October 23.
The six-piece collection features musical contributions from Luther Dickinson of North Mississippi Allstars and The Black Crowes, Charlie Parr, Anthony Pirog of The Messthetics, Ethan Miller of Orcutt, Shelley, Miller, and James Toth of Wooden Wand.
The first single, “A Revolution in Just Existing,” featuring Charlie Parr, is available now.
In the fall of 2023, Lekas, author of Saturday Night Sage and creator of Sounds from the Shadow Factory, endured a prolonged and nearly fatal illness. He then began an extended physical, mental, and spiritual recovery.
In the spring of 2024, Lekas underwent six supervised psychedelic-treatment sessions. Flowers of Perennial Dissent is an unfiltered document of that life-changing experience, examining the reliability of consciousness, the connection between mental and physical health, spiritual attrition, and the rebellious endurance of existence.
As a child, Lekas was raised in an immigrant household where Catholicism met Buddhism and Krishna Consciousness intersected with American Christianity. His parents were devotees for a time, during which he received his Harinama initiation, the ritual of being given a new spiritual name. The family eventually left the practice, though the practice never completely left him.
“Illness can ignite a type of ego death that feels more like collapse than resurrection,” Lekas says. “Which feels sad, but on the other side of it is something far more beautiful than whatever we call identity.”
That journey—the collapse of material security and the revelation of divine reconciliation—inspired the six poems that make up Flowers of Perennial Dissent.
Presented as both a chapbook and record, the project pairs Lekas’ writing with a group of distinctive guitarists, composers, and improvisers. Dickinson, Parr, Pirog, Miller, and Toth help bring the collection to life through a musical setting that moves between psychedelic folk, experimental composition, roots music, and spoken word.
Drawing from a lifetime of spiritual seeking, Lekas explores intergenerational conversations with prophets and ancestors, the void that envelops all experience, and the resonant frequency that informs all creation.
Flowers of Perennial Dissent lays bare personal vulnerability in search of solidarity. An inscription printed on the album and inside the chapbook reads, “This collection is dedicated to the few who were there for the worst of it, and anyone who finds a little solidarity in the retelling of it.”
Through that retelling, Lekas deconstructs his experience within the sonic framework created by some of America’s most adventurous contemporary guitarists and composers. The result is at once Sangha and song, poem and parable, holy and wholly human.
Lekas’ work has appeared in more than 60 publications. He is a frequent contributor to Fretboard Journal, Aquarium Drunkard, The Industrial Worker, and the Berthoud Surveyor, in addition to publishing his own Substack, The Lunch-Bucket Letters.
His debut book, Saturday Night Sage: 42 Poems of Mysticism and Menial Labor, was published by Blind Owl Records in 2019 as the label’s inaugural literary release. Featuring jacket artwork by rock ’n’ roll illustrator Alan Forbes, the collection quickly sold out of its first printing.
Please Kill Me described it as “an incandescent book of poetry,” while PANK Magazine praised its blue-collar spirituality and examination of American life, writing that the work suggested the Beat aesthetic had survived and evolved into something “shorter, sharper, and tied to contemporary America.”
Following Saturday Night Sage, Lekas collaborated with Howlin Rain, Mrs. Henry, members of Garcia Peoples, and others on the spoken-word EP Sounds from the Shadow Factory.
The project attracted the attention of longtime Rolling Stone editor David Fricke, who debuted the title track, “Saturday Night Sage,” featuring Howlin Rain, on his Writer’s Block radio show.
Fricke described it as “poetry and psychedelia, as if Tom Waits had hitched a ride on the Jefferson Airplane’s version of ‘Wooden Ships.’”
A series of short films also brought Lekas’ poetry to festival screens from New York City to Los Angeles. Midwestern, directed by The Joelsons, screened at the Milwaukee Short Film Festival, while We Got a Problem with Groundwater, directed by Shelby Baldock, appeared at the LA Short Film Festival, Memphis Film Festival, and the NYC Bowery Awards, where it won first prize.
Throughout his music career, Lekas has shared stages with artists ranging from Milwaukee Labor Poet Laureate Larry Penn to Hot Water Music’s Chuck Ragan. He has also played guitar with The Silent Comedy, Marc Ford & the Neptune Blues Club, and outsider punk group Johnny Monster & the Nightmares.
After spending nearly a decade concentrating on work as a sideman, Lekas interviewed Nora Guthrie for Aquarium Drunkard in 2022. The conversation reinvigorated his commitment to performing as a solo artist.
“I’m at a point where I’m looking behind me and going, so who else is going to be there?” Guthrie told him. “Talking to you right now is getting me a little teary-eyed, to be honest, because I know that you’ll be there. It’s very profound to me. There has always been this trail of people that just keep the baton passing.”
With Guthrie’s encouragement, Lekas returned to the stage accompanied only by his acoustic guitar, immersing himself again in the poetry, folk traditions, and labor songs he first encountered during the early 2000s.
That renewed momentum was interrupted by his illness in 2023. Three years later, Lekas returns with a new album, a new chapbook, and a string of solo performances across Colorado’s Front Range.
Flowers of Perennial Dissent will be released October 23 through Blind Owl Records on vinyl, CD, and streaming platforms, as well as in a limited-edition chapbook format.
