Chad Turner Ray * Fingers Crossed LP

Fingers Crossed is the record Chad Ray Turner emptied his bank account to make. In the fall of 2025 he drove is New Orleans band - a crew of irrational dreamer hustlers he spent three years assembling - to Muscle Shoals, chasing the horn tracks off the records that raised him and the chance to sing in that room where the ghosts are still hanging around.The title track came first, written around 2020 in Lawrence, Kansas, when everything permanent started feeling uncertain and squishy and unbelievable, and he half-knew but couldn't yet admit that he felt the same way inside. The rest chronicles the years since, written right up to the week before the session: divorce, loss, the endless war against American poverty and disease, avoidance, brutal honesty, new love, unappreciated love, sex, drugs, rock and roll salvation, joy and futility.Driving home from the session, Turner retired the pseudonym he'd used on his 2023 debut, recorded in Lawrence with Rob and Pope (The Get Up Kids, Spoon). There's nothing oblique about these songs and nowhere to hide inside them, he says. So if they're going to be heard, I'm gonna stand behind them.He's a preacher's kid from Bakersfield, a punk drummer since thirteen and a practice PA in HIV and community health. He wrote this record between clinic days because he had to.