8/19/25 ADDS
CURRENT
UPCOMING
RECENT
LIVE
ABOUT
CASEY DIENEL
My Heart is an Outlaw (Jealous Butcher Records)
Add date: 10.17.2025
Release date: 10.21.2025
Links:
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Instagram
Official Website
Spotify
Substack
Tidal
TikTok
YouTube
What does freedom look like when it isn't tied to escape, but to presence? Can we build a meaningful life full of love without being domesticated by it, without self-erasure? What does resistance through radical openness sound like? “Joy, especially queer joy, is revolutionary,” Casey Dienel explains. “Even in the face of everything else, I wanted to show that happiness is still possible—and necessary.”
My Heart Is An Outlaw is Casey Dienel’s seventh album and first studio release. It arrives after eight years away, the result of a renewed trust in collaboration as a radical act of surrender. The album’s 11 tracks— each a film and a melodic treasure trove— offer a reckoning with freedom, identity, and the conflicting desire for both solitude and intimacy. Recorded at Altamira Sound in Los Angeles, Figure 8 Recording in New York, and Chamber of Commerce in Vermont, the record zooms from micro to macro, intimate breath to mic drop.
Dienel’s deep bench of over a dozen session ringers here–plus producer Adam Schatz (Japanese Breakfast, Landlady, Neko Case), mixing engineer Jake Aron (Solange, Snail Mail), and mastering engineer Heba Kadry (Björk, Sade, John Cale)--is a reflection of the album’s core narratives of connection, transformation, and the kaleidoscope revealed when one is actually present to themselves and others, flaws and all. The songwriter, producer, writer, and multi-instrumentalist was used to doing it all by themselves. This time, Dienel set out with a different mission: what would happen if this album could be made in any way they wanted, with all their favorite people? What might it sound like if they threw the self-made, arbitrary rules out the window?
Tonally drawing from My Own Private Idaho and pop epics like Born in the U.S.A. and Faith, Dienel probes what it means to purposefully live outside of conventional cultural scripts. With basic tracking performed live at Altamira, the aforementioned favorite people (including bassist Spencer Zahn, Meernaa’s Carly Bond and Hand Habits’s meg duffy on guitars, drummer Max Jaffe, and Schatz on synths) built a house around Dienel’s piano-based songbook that is all open doors; open windows. “The heart has a mind of its own. It's the thing holding you back that you have to set free on your own time, in your own way. Nobody can do it for you,” they explain, adding that the very thing that makes you an outlaw to yourself “might be your saving grace.”
My Heart is an Outlaw navigates the multiplicity of memory, the fragmentation of time, the realization that no matter how much we want to think we know what someone else is thinking, we absolutely do not, and the complexity of those pernicious inner voices—the critic, the saboteur, the “butcher” within. It’s about integration, not exile, you see. It’s an embrace of contradiction and imperfection; a running towards, not from. Hold on loosely.
These songs, like the hundreds of others birthed in Dienel’s lengthy career under their own name and as White Hinterland, hit them in the middle of the night like lightning, often fully formed. “I’ve been writing since I was eight…songs are the houseguests that show up on their own time… you have one choice: to answer the call or not. I always have.” Dienel’s porousness and readiness, besides being the mark of a true artist, define My Heart Is An Outlaw. So too does the patience they had to hold out for work they can stand behind. This album is a declaration of agency and a celebration of the creative process from start to finish; it’s where self-reliance gives way to community, control to trust, and silence to more hooks than every Bass Pro Shop in America.
— Joan LeMay
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Official Website
Spotify
Substack
Tidal
TikTok
YouTube
What does freedom look like when it isn't tied to escape, but to presence? Can we build a meaningful life full of love without being domesticated by it, without self-erasure? What does resistance through radical openness sound like? “Joy, especially queer joy, is revolutionary,” Casey Dienel explains. “Even in the face of everything else, I wanted to show that happiness is still possible—and necessary.”
My Heart Is An Outlaw is Casey Dienel’s seventh album and first studio release. It arrives after eight years away, the result of a renewed trust in collaboration as a radical act of surrender. The album’s 11 tracks— each a film and a melodic treasure trove— offer a reckoning with freedom, identity, and the conflicting desire for both solitude and intimacy. Recorded at Altamira Sound in Los Angeles, Figure 8 Recording in New York, and Chamber of Commerce in Vermont, the record zooms from micro to macro, intimate breath to mic drop.
Dienel’s deep bench of over a dozen session ringers here–plus producer Adam Schatz (Japanese Breakfast, Landlady, Neko Case), mixing engineer Jake Aron (Solange, Snail Mail), and mastering engineer Heba Kadry (Björk, Sade, John Cale)--is a reflection of the album’s core narratives of connection, transformation, and the kaleidoscope revealed when one is actually present to themselves and others, flaws and all. The songwriter, producer, writer, and multi-instrumentalist was used to doing it all by themselves. This time, Dienel set out with a different mission: what would happen if this album could be made in any way they wanted, with all their favorite people? What might it sound like if they threw the self-made, arbitrary rules out the window?
Tonally drawing from My Own Private Idaho and pop epics like Born in the U.S.A. and Faith, Dienel probes what it means to purposefully live outside of conventional cultural scripts. With basic tracking performed live at Altamira, the aforementioned favorite people (including bassist Spencer Zahn, Meernaa’s Carly Bond and Hand Habits’s meg duffy on guitars, drummer Max Jaffe, and Schatz on synths) built a house around Dienel’s piano-based songbook that is all open doors; open windows. “The heart has a mind of its own. It's the thing holding you back that you have to set free on your own time, in your own way. Nobody can do it for you,” they explain, adding that the very thing that makes you an outlaw to yourself “might be your saving grace.”
My Heart is an Outlaw navigates the multiplicity of memory, the fragmentation of time, the realization that no matter how much we want to think we know what someone else is thinking, we absolutely do not, and the complexity of those pernicious inner voices—the critic, the saboteur, the “butcher” within. It’s about integration, not exile, you see. It’s an embrace of contradiction and imperfection; a running towards, not from. Hold on loosely.
These songs, like the hundreds of others birthed in Dienel’s lengthy career under their own name and as White Hinterland, hit them in the middle of the night like lightning, often fully formed. “I’ve been writing since I was eight…songs are the houseguests that show up on their own time… you have one choice: to answer the call or not. I always have.” Dienel’s porousness and readiness, besides being the mark of a true artist, define My Heart Is An Outlaw. So too does the patience they had to hold out for work they can stand behind. This album is a declaration of agency and a celebration of the creative process from start to finish; it’s where self-reliance gives way to community, control to trust, and silence to more hooks than every Bass Pro Shop in America.
— Joan LeMay