Tea Leaf Green will release Looking West, its first album since 2008, on June 8. This disc features a number of songs that the group has performed live but has yet to record in a studio setting. The group’s Trevor Garrod explains, “We’ve been waiting a long time to make this record.” The album’s second track, “Dreaming Without Sleeping,” is now available in advance of the album’s release on Relix.com.

Here’s what songwriter Garrod had to say about the song: “I’ve always been a little wary of the unknown powers of certain talismans: golden lockets, photographs, crystals, lucky socks, all these things that people carry around with them. While they might be bringing luck, couldn’t they just as easily be carrying curses? Or perhaps, those pieces once lucky have of late run out of charm. One day I was feeling a little low down in a dry river bed somewhere in west Texas. I couldn’t decide if my life was lucky or cursed, if anything was worth while, indeed, if there was any point in living at all. A funny little chicken feather flew past and I reached out and caught it. I still have that chicken feather today…”

As for the album itself, he adds “It’s almost as if we’ve loved these songs too much and were afraid to encase them forever behind the iron bars of a vacuum sealed, shrink wrapped studio album. We have come to realize that we can only truly set these beloved tunes free by putting them all down on a record. We are releasing them into the wild. We are casting them out to sea. We are ‘Looking West’ into the setting sun and launching them into outer space. These songs are messages in bottles washed up on foreign shores, alien transmissions from distant worlds, memories from our fading youth, and reminders of our endless and repetitious search for love and freedom.”