With Train Leaving Dallas, Thom Bishop has created an album that looks both backward and forward. Set for release on July 31st, 2026, the record features twelve tracks: six original songs and six reimagined classics. Rather than treating those halves as separate ideas, Bishop and producer Billy Panda designed the album so that the originals would carry the weight of classics and the covers would feel newly alive.
Bishop and Panda’s creative partnership stretches back many years, including writing, performing and recording together. The six original songs on Train Leaving Dallas were co-written while both artists were living in Nashville. The cover versions, meanwhile, were drawn from songs they had played together across years of live performances. This history gives the album a lived-in quality, built from shared experience rather than studio calculation.
The lead single, “Here Comes The Night,” was chosen by Bishop, Panda and Executive Producer Grace McKay. Bishop traces the idea for the recording to a night in Galway, where he sat with a guitar and thought about what song would feel right in that moment. The answer led him back to Van Morrison, American radio and the emotional bridge between American and Irish musical traditions.
Bishop’s life and career have travelled through music, literature, teaching and personal resilience. He has written more than a thousand songs, taught at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and published acclaimed novels under the pen name Junior Burke. After surviving major personal upheavals, including the destruction of his home in a 2013 flood and a later near-fatal accident, Bishop now brings renewed focus to his work. Train Leaving Dallas stands as a testament to endurance, collaboration and the timeless pull of rock ‘n’ roll.