About the Book

Truckload of Art is the definitive, authorized biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic musician whose work bridges the disparate worlds of contemporary art and country music

“People tell me it’s country music,” Terry Allen has joked, “and I ask, ‘Which country?’” For nearly sixty years, Allen’s inimitable art has explored the borderlands of memory, crossing boundaries between disciplines and audiences by conjuring indelible stories out of the howling West Texas wind.

In Truckload of Art, author Brendan Greaves exhaustively traces the influences that shaped Allen’s extraordinary life, from his childhood in Lubbock, Texas, spent ringside and side stage at the wrestling matches and concerts his father promoted, to his formative art-school years in incendiary 1960s Los Angeles, and through subsequent decades doggedly pursuing his uncompromising artistic vision. With humor and critical acumen, Greaves deftly recounts how Allen built a career and cult following with pioneering independent records like Lubbock (on everything) (1979)—widely considered an archetype of alternative country—and multiyear, multimedia bodies of richly narrative, interconnected art and theatrical works, including JUAREZ (ongoing since 1968), hailed as among the most significant statements in the history of American vernacular music and conceptual art.

Drawing on hundreds of revealing interviews with Allen himself, his family members, and his many notable friends, colleagues, and collaborators—from musicians like David Byrne and Kurt Vile to artists such as Bruce Nauman and Kiki Smith—and informed by unprecedented access to the artist’s home, studio, journals, and archives, Greaves offers a poetic, deeply personal portrait of arguably the most singularly multivalent storyteller of the American West.

About the Author

Brendan Greaves is founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors and has collaborated on numerous projects with Terry Allen, including Pedal Steal + Four Corners, for which he earned a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes. A folklorist, essayist, and lapsed art worker, he studied at Harvard and UNC, and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife, Samantha, and son, Asa.

About the Artist

Terry Allen is a songwriter, visual and recording artist, and playwright. He’s released more than a dozen studio albums since his 1975 debut, Juarez, and his wide-ranging artwork resides in collections around the world, including the Met, MoMA, and LACMA. Raised in Lubbock, Texas, since 1989 he has resided in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and collaborator, the performer and poet Jo Harvey Allen.  detail and gives careful attention.

Paradise of Bachelors

Paradise of Bachelors is a critically acclaimed, Grammy-nominated record label dedicated to documenting and releasing under-recognized vernacular music and art, historical and contemporary alike, with an emphasis on the American South—very broadly defined—and its global sound diaspora. The label has represented Terry Allen and his catalog since 2015.

Praise for Truckload of Art

Masterful … An endlessly fascinating biography of an endlessly fascinating artist. – Booklist (starred review)

[A] rollicking debut biography … a thrilling whirl … Scrupulous detail and raucous picaresque merge with evocative discussions of the artist’s work … It adds up to a fascinating portrait of an American original. – Publishers Weekly

Dazzling … [Greaves’s] research is as meticulous and exhaustive as his writing is inspired … He deftly moves between biography and criticism, unpacking Allen’s famously inscrutable drawings and verses, capable of spooling in and out of one another for decades as if gliding along a Möbius strip, through empathetic understanding of where the artist has been … A true testament to commitment from both artist and biographer. – MOJO

“[An] exhilarating investigation of a life spent in the act of constant creation … [Greaves] is a compassionate biographer with the perceptive eye of an art critic.” – Aquarium Drunkard

Greaves does an admirable job describing the ecumenical contexts and nuances of what are often indescribable works. But he does an even grander job, with clear but measured affection, getting onto the page the contexts and nuances of Terry Allen, an utterly unique figure at the crossroads … of American art, however you define it. – Garden and Gun

9/10. [Greaves] assembles a persuasive argument in which Allen can be viewed as the godfather of alternative country. – Uncut

In Greaves, Allen has found a meticulous and empathetic Boswell … Truckload emerges not as a standard tale of the rise and fall (or fall and rise) of a tortured genius outsider/outlaw, but a patient study in artistic process and memory, the cultural intricacies of the twentieth-century West, and in people, how they scar and save you, like the lightning in Allen’s song “Cortez Sail”—“tearing the clouds, then closing the tear.” – 4 Columns

The Allen family’s life has been as much an inspiration for me as Terry’s wonderful art and music. I wondered to myself, “How does a creative person navigate family life, and life with friends, with their creative life?” This book is the instruction manual.

– David Byrne, author of How Music Works

Terry Allen’s creative depth has guided his life, leading him to become the great artist, writer, and musician he is. Like a tornado, he has swirled a community around himself, drawn together by his generosity and inclusivity. It is wonderful that Brendan Greaves has written a book that is as complex and compassionate as Terry and as moving and raw as his art and music. 

– Kiki Smith

Blending West Texas fiction, hearsay, memoir, anthropological dig, and journalistic fact, Brendan Greaves has fashioned a biographical narrative that skillfully frames the life and times of the visual artist, singer-songwriter, playwright, raconteur, and beautiful dreamer known as Terry Allen. Only a Truckload of Art could do him justice. I couldn’t put it down.

– Rodney Crowell

Terry Allen is my hero, and Brendan changed my life when he introduced us. It’s about time they change your life too.

– Kurt Vile

Brendan Greaves is an unusually deft and perceptive historian of music and art, but he writes with so much heart and verve that after a few chapters, his prose starts to feel like its own song: wild, intelligent, rhythmic, true. His subject here—the inimitable Terry Allen, one of the deepest and most wonderful American artists I can think of—is so well-served by Greaves’s adventurousness and smarts. What a gorgeous, necessary book.

– Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker; author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records

Written with the narrative verve of a great novel and a poet’s eye for enchanting detail, Truckload of Art is an inspired, definitive illumination of the life and genius of a vital American artist.

– Wells Tower, screenwriter and journalist; author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Once upon a time when I lived in Pasadena and Terry and Jo Harvey were in Fresno, I was there with my wife working at a stone quarry and had dinner and stayed the night with them. We cleaned squid, and Jo Harvey made a lovely dinner.

The next morning all of us had violent diarrhea and we quickly ran out of toilet paper and then every possible useable paper-like material. 

When we returned home, I bought and shipped a large box of toilet paper from a restaurant supply store. Terry sent one back painted black, which still sits on my dining table, used as a candlestick holder. 

Terry and Jo Harvey—friends as long as we last.

– Bruce Nauman

Terry Allen is our modern Michelangelo—a painter, sculptor, and conceptualist informed by honky-tonk sensibilities and a singer-songwriter of incisive, vividly-depicted songs who knows his way around galleries and museums. His Florence is Lubbock, Texas, where a local boast was “Lubbock Has More Sky.” This biography tells precisely how Terry Allen filled up all that empty space. It is the most detailed history of the making of a life in art that I’ve ever read. 

– Joe Nick Patoski, author of Willie Nelson: An Epic Life; director of Sir Doug & the Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove

When I was asked to write a few sentences about this new book on Terry Allen’s life and art, I immediately felt that it was an impossible task. Then I thought about Terry and all the times I have asked him impossible questions and received the most profound responses from him in one or two words. He has been hands down one of the most influential characters of my life, and I’m looking forward to having this book to reference and share with friends, family, and future generations who may look to find their way through life in art and music. Because today’s rainbow really is tomorrow’s tamale.

– Ryan Bingham

Truckload of Art is a monumental work that captures the passionate, complex life of an artist whose career blends visual art and country music with unique power. Brendan Greaves unveils the supercharged art and music worlds created by Terry Allen, from his formative years in Lubbock, Texas, to California and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Truckload of Art brilliantly captures the soul of a truly great American artist who embraces his Texas roots and energizes them with his genius at every step of his career.


– William Ferris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues; former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities

With Greaves’s help, Allen tells his most compelling story yet, the story of his creative life. – Texas Highways

Greaves proves uniquely situated to understand Allen’s works … [He] has laid an invaluable foundation for understanding Allen’s life and work … drawing throughlines from Allen’s life across his intertextual artistic narratives. – Austin Chronicle

A summation and exemplar of a collaborative art practice that is as much ethos as it is any single song or sculpture or image … part of the art vortex that is Terry Allen. – Observer

Book Events

January 13, 2024 – Key West, FL: Inaugural Truckload of Art Road Show reading and Allen MemWars quartet performance at the Key West Literary Seminar, Key West Amphitheater.

March 1, 2024 at Stories – Los Angeles, CA, 7pm: Due to late-breaking logistical issues with the concert venue, the LA Truckload of Art book reading will now take place instead at the excellent bookstore Stories in Echo Park, on Friday, March 1 at 7pm, with a reading by Brendan Greaves and a conversation with Terry and our dear friend, art dealer Nina Johnson. This is a free event, open to the public, with opportunities for signed bookplates and preorders. Many thanks to the wonderful folks at Stories for enthusiastically accommodating us at the last minute. Details here.

March 2, 2024 at Frieze art fair – Santa Monica, CA, 2pm: For those with Frieze passes, Terry and Brendan will also be at L.A. Louver’s booth at the Santa Monica Airport on Saturday, March 2 at 2pm, for a meet-and-greet, bookplate signing, and casual conversations about Truckload of Art and Terry’s Frieze mini-retrospective There Oughta Be a Law Against Sunny Southern California. Details here.

March 19, 2024 – Chapel Hill, NC, 5:30pm: Publication day! Greaves reading, signing, and discussion with David Menconi at Flyleaf Books.

April 2, 2024 – Washington, DC, 7pm: Reading, signing, and discussion with John Lingan at Rhizome.

April 3, 2024 – Philadelphia, PA, 6pm: Reading, signing, and discussion with Anthony Elms at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery.

April 24, 2024 – Austin, TX, 6pm: Truckload of Art Road Show reading, discussion with Terry and Michael Hall, book signing, and Allen MemWars quartet performance at Austin Central Library, sponsored by the Austin Library Foundation. Free with advance ticket registration.

April 26, 2024: Reading/discussion/signing at Tabor, Charlotte, NC, with Cream Puff Records and Park Road Books.

Stay tuned by following the Truckload of Art Facebook page.