release feature
Waylon Jennings' Diamonds Digs Up a Duet Nobody Knew Existed
A 1978 studio session with Glen Campbell sat untouched for decades — until Waylon's son built an entire album's release calendar around it.
Do the arithmetic on Waylon Jennings' catalog and something strange turns up: Diamonds will be his 48th studio album, and the second one to arrive since his death in 2002. That's not a victory-lap box set or a scattered rarities comp. It's a working discography that keeps growing years after the man who built it stopped adding to it. The credit for that belongs to his son, Shooter Jennings, who has been combing through Waylon's personal recording archive and assembling what he's positioned as an ongoing series — Diamonds is installment two, not a one-off. Framed that way, this isn't nostalgia merchandising. It's archival stewardship with a release schedule.
The album's title track is the reason the whole thing has momentum. It was recorded in December 1978, during a Waylon Jennings session, and co-written by Jennings and Glen Campbell, who also plays guitar on the recording. Richie Albright — Jennings' longtime drummer — produced it alongside Tony Joe White, with The Waylors handling backing vocals. That's a real lineup, not a posthumous studio patch job: the song existed, fully realized, with two of country music's most recognizable names on the same take, and it simply never left the archive. Forty-plus years is a long time for a Jennings-Campbell duet to sit in a box.
## A Father's Day Release, Announced on a Sunday Morning
The rollout has been deliberate. The title track itself came out June 21, 2026, timed to land on Father's Day — a pointed choice for a song co-written by two artists who are both gone, surfaced by a son working through his father's tapes. The formal announcement followed the next morning on CBS Sunday Morning, June 22, which is the kind of platform reserved for stories with weight behind them rather than a routine single drop. Alongside it came an official lyric video, directed by Will Acuña and posted to Jennings' verified YouTube channel — a modern rollout wrapped around a forty-seven-year-old recording, which is its own small collision of eras worth noticing if you watch it.
## Two Release Dates Tell You Who This Is For
Diamonds arrives in two stages, and the gap between them says something about who Shooter Jennings is building this for. Physical formats — LP, CD, cassette, and download — land November 13. Streaming doesn't open until December 11, nearly a month later. That's a sequencing choice, not a scheduling accident: collectors and completists get first access, while the algorithmic-discovery audience waits. For an archival release built from session tapes rather than new performances, that ordering makes sense — it rewards the audience most likely to already know why a Jennings-Campbell outtake matters, before it becomes a playlist entry for people scrolling past it.
The album itself holds twelve songs, all previously unreleased archival recordings, which puts real weight behind the word "archive" rather than treating it as marketing language. This isn't a deluxe reissue padded with alternate takes of songs everyone already owns. It's an entire tracklist of material that, as far as the public record goes, has never been heard.
What makes Diamonds worth paying attention to now isn't a countdown clock or a superlative — it's the shape of the project itself. Shooter Jennings isn't reintroducing his father with a single career-spanning anthology; he's releasing him in installments, the way a living artist would, with each one built around whatever the tapes actually contain. That's a different kind of posthumous catalog management than the genre usually gets, and it raises a fair question heading into November: if there's a Jennings-Campbell session this fully formed still sitting in storage, what else is in that archive waiting for its own release date?