JACK RAYMOND ANNOUNCES SECOND ALBUM MR. KNOW IT ALL

Australian folk, roots and blues songwriter Jack Raymond will release his second studio album, Mr. Know It All, on Monday 28 September, bringing together a collection of songs about family, addiction, relationships, old stories, uncomfortable truths and the strange ways we all try to make sense of the lives we’re living.

It’s an album Raymond has taken his time with. Where his first record The Long Story Short was made while he was still finding his feet in the studio, Mr. Know It All came together very differently. The songs were given time to grow before Raymond and producer Ryan Tracey locked themselves away at Scribble Gum Farm on the Sunshine Coast for three weeks and pulled them apart again.

The result is bigger, darker and more adventurous, but the stories are still at the centre of everything.

“I think this album is probably the closest I’ve got to actually sounding like myself,” Raymond says. “We weren’t in a rush. Ryan and I had time to muck around, get things wrong, try different sounds and work out what each song actually needed rather than just throwing everything at it.”

Electric guitars sit alongside acoustic instruments, haunting pads and small sonic details that come and go throughout the record, giving Raymond’s folk and blues foundations a much wider landscape to live in.

The album was produced and engineered by Ryan Tracey, with Dancing in Glory produced and engineered by JB Paterson. The record was mixed by Angus Woodhead at Glasshouse Studios and mastered by Paul Blakey at 12th & Vine Post.

At the centre of it all is Mr. Know It All, a character Raymond created while trying to make sense of the imbalance he saw around him. He isn’t exactly a hero. He’s not particularly polite either. Instead, he became a way of levelling the playing field between the bloke on the street and the bloke in the penthouse.

That character doesn’t necessarily appear literally in every song, but his questions run through the album: How much of our lives do we actually choose? What do we inherit? What do we carry? What should we let go of? And how do we look after each other a little better?

Those questions take the record into some deeply personal places. Hollow Trees looks back at Raymond’s childhood in Victoria’s High Country, where a row of Paulownia trees planted by his parents grew alongside him before beginning to collapse around the same time his parents’ marriage did. Prisoner started as a song written for a friend struggling with addiction before Raymond eventually realised he’d written a fair bit of himself into it.

Ships in the Night comes directly from Raymond’s relationship and the reality of two people chasing very different working lives while trying to build the same future. Break the Mould is a push against living on autopilot and accepting a life simply because it’s the one that seems easiest or most expected. Carpe Diem asks the opposite question: what happens if we stop chasing the next thing for five minutes and actually notice where we are?

Elsewhere, Dancing in Glory looks at inherited beliefs and the freedom to question what previous generations handed down, while Run Yandina Run turns towards the history held in the Australian landscape and the importance of keeping difficult stories alive rather than allowing them to quietly disappear.

Together, they’re different stories, but they’re all wrestling with much the same thing: people. People getting things wrong. People trying again. Families that aren’t perfect. Relationships stretched by life. The habits we hide behind. The stories buried in the places we live. And the possibility that, with a bit of honesty, we might be able to do things differently.

“I don’t think I realised how connected all of these songs were until we had the record sitting in front of us,” Raymond says. “They’re all about people trying to work something out. I definitely don’t have the answers. That’s probably why the album ended up being called Mr. Know It All.”

The album arrives after a year that has taken Raymond from the Kimberley to Kings Canyon and back across Australia, continuing the kind of touring that has become central to his music: regional towns, community halls, folk festivals and listening rooms where the story matters as much as the song.

That grassroots connection is already carrying into the new record. Hundreds of physical copies of Mr. Know It All have been sold ahead of its official release, giving the independent album a strong start before it reaches streaming platforms on September 28.

Raymond will bring the album to the stage across September and October with a run of intimate launch shows before undertaking a much larger Australian tour from January through March 2027.

MR. KNOW IT ALL — ALBUM LAUNCH SHOWS

• Friday 18 September — Mt Nimmel Hall, Austinville — Gold Coast
• Saturday 19 September — The Junk Bar, New Farm — Brisbane matinee with Ryan Tracey & Georgia Scarlett
• Friday 25 September — Mapleton Public House — with Ryan Tracey & Daryl James
• Monday 28 September — MR. KNOW IT ALL — ALBUM RELEASE
• Friday 2 October — Noosa Arts Theatre — with Ryan Tracey & Daryl James

The shows continue the world Raymond has been building around what he calls Mountain Roots: folk storytelling, blues grit and songs shaped by the mountains, roads, people and places he’s encountered along the way.

After years of figuring out exactly what that means, Mr. Know It All might be the clearest answer yet.

Not because Jack Raymond suddenly knows it all.

Quite the opposite.