Pete Yorn has been celebrating milestone after milestone. He made his acting debut in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, scored his ninth Top 10 AAA hit, marked a landmark birthday, and released his tenth studio album, The Hard Way (via Shelly Music). The record blends country and folk textures with Yorn’s raw vocals, cinematic strings, and vivid, confessional lyrics. Co-written and produced by Josh Gudwin, the succinct 25-minute album features the introspective “Someday, Someday,” debuted on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Good Morning America in January 2024, and “Real Good Love,” performed on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. Yorn returned to Kimmel in January 2025 to perform the title track. The Hard Way confirms why SPIN calls him “one of his generation’s best songwriters.”
“I was face to face with my own mortality, and that forces you to rise above it and figure out new ways to look at life and change the ways you react to things,” says Yorn. “It’s not a bummer record—the title comes from [the idea that] change is hard, but [if you] commit to something and want to make your life better for everyone around you, including yourself, you have no choice but to do that. It’s a celebratory record, it makes me excited and proud of being able to rise above a lot of adversity in my personal life.”
A New Jersey native equally inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar introspection and Lou Reed’s deadpan stream-of-consciousness, Yorn first broke out in 2001 with his extraordinary Columbia Records debut, musicforthemorningafter. The album was hailed by NPR as one of the year’s finest and quickly went RIAA Platinum, propelled by universal acclaim and Yorn’s relentless touring. Rolling Stone praised it as “atmospheric, gently lit by sunlight and regret,” while The Guardian called it “sublime,” and The AV Club deemed it “the first chapter in a long and exciting career.”
Over the following decades, Yorn solidified his reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter, releasing nine more critically acclaimed solo albums and collaborating with Frank Black, Peter Buck, Liz Phair, and Scarlett Johansson (their 2009 joint release, Break Up, went Platinum in France). With a voice Consequence of Sound described as “ruined and forlorn,” Yorn has performed on Letterman, Fallon, Kimmel, Ellen, and more, while sharing bills with artists as varied as R.E.M., Coldplay, My Morning Jacket, and The Chicks, and appearing at major festivals from Coachella and Bonnaroo to Glastonbury and Austin City Limits.
In 2019, he released Caretakers, which featured the Top 2 AAA single “Calm Down.” The New Yorker praised the album’s “dreamy synths-and-strings jangle,” and AllMusic’s 4-star review described the music as “lush yet spare, tuneful but not forceful, cinematic yet small scale…an appealing blend that sets it apart from most other albums in 2019.”
The Hard Way follows his 2022 LP HAWAII, praised by SPIN, American Songwriter, Paste, and more. Other recent releases include Pete Yorn Sings the Classics, his first-ever covers collection; Pete Yorn Live At The Troubadour; and The Trilogy: Morning, Day, And Night, a five-CD box set including complete audio downloads from his Veeps full album live streams of musicforthemorningafter, Day I Forgot, and Nightcrawler.
97.3 KBCO Presents
PETE YORN (SOLO ACOUSTIC)
25th Anniversary of musicforthemorningafter
FOX THEATRE
Saturday, April 18, 2026
Doors: 7:00 pm | Show: 8:00 pm
Tickets on sale 10AM Friday, October 3 HERE
General Admission Tickets
All Ages (under 16 with an adult)
