Singer-songwriter Doug Levitt has shared his new single “Cold Comfort,” the next offering from his upcoming debut album Edge of Everywhere, out March 3. The poignant new track finds Levitt singing about the struggles of addiction he’s encountered throughout his ongoing Greyhound bus journey over the last decade, traveling over 120,000 miles to date and sharing the inspiring stories of folks he’s met through song.

“Cold Comfort” arrives on the heels of Levitt’s recently announced Lincoln Center show on March 21 in New York City and his new partnership with Guitars for Vets. Proceeds from the show along with future dates and sales from Edge of Everywhere will benefit the organization, which provides guitars for veterans and teaches them how to play. Edge of Everywhere is available

Of the track, Levitt says, “‘Cold Comfort’ is a song that speaks to the wide range of vices that one finds on the bus, people getting over one, through one and while it says ‘another shot of cold comfort,’ there are many other reliances that have been central to people who travel by bus. Often it’s the vice most drawn upon in the wake of a breakup.  There are people like the former-petty thief Tony Rhodes, who, facing a breakup, found himself back on heroin and near the verge of death. There’s Edward who, having smoked weed in the face of a breakup, ended up violating parole and going on the run. I had been through a hard breakup with a fiancee before I set out by bus. So in some ways it’s that energy. I woke up on the wrong side of myself again. Sometimes it’s a matter of days. Sometimes it’s a matter of going our separate ways. And so also on the bus are people relocating after a breakup, and who doesn’t know that feeling of another shot of cold comfort? It’s a cold comfort, not the comfort of connection. It’s not the comfort of others. It’s the way you always bring me around for bringing me down.”

With a bourbon-rich baritone and a range that reaches the heights of a falsetto at times recalling Cat Stevens, Levitt brings listeners along on a transcendental trip in which we are all travelers on a bus writ large. Following the success of a BBC World Service documentary in 2018, two more documentaries about his Greyhound journeys are planned to broadcast later this year on BBC Radio 4 and BBC 4 TV, featuring songs from Edge of Everywhere. 

Perhaps it was suffering tragedy as a young person which made Levitt so receptive to other people’s stories. When he was 16, he tragically found his father dead by suicide. For years, he says, he couldn’t cry and turned to music as an outlet. But before using that music to reflect the journeys of others, he set out on his own, first at Cornell, where he studied Critical Thinking with Carl Sagan, and then as a London-based foreign correspondent for CNN and ABC filing dispatches from such places as Iran, Rwanda, Bosnia and Gaza.

He followed those instincts to Music City, USA. Not long after moving to Nashville, Levitt set out on his first Greyhound tour, with nothing but an initial six-week bus pass, a Gibson J-100, a copy of Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, a country to cross and an American story to tell, one about life from the margins in. More than 120,000 Greyhound miles on from that first tour — with stops along the way playing in everything from prisons, VAs, and shelters to the Kennedy Center, Woody Guthrie Center, and Martin Luther King’s church — have all culminated in the moving opus that is Edge of Everywhere, a testament-in-song to belonging and connection in the face of uncertainty.

Photo Courtesy: Patrick Fraser