Jeffrey Halford & The Healers - Used parts

Americana

Used Parts: Jeffrey Halford & The Healers Prove You Don’t Need to Start Over to Keep Moving Forward

Thirty years into a career, most songwriters have either burned out their sense of curiosity or settled comfortably into repeating themselves. Jeffrey Halford has done neither. Used Parts, his ninth album with his longtime band The Healers, is the sound of a musician who has kept every scar and every mile of road he’s travelled and turned all of it into some of the most vivid, lived-in Americana you’ll hear this year. It’s a record that earns its title in the best possible way: nothing here is pretending to be new for the sake of it, and that honesty is exactly what makes it so compelling.

Halford’s story is the kind that shapes a songwriter whether he wants it to or not. Born in Dallas and raised on the move up and down the California coast, he found his footing first through surfing and then, as a teenager tuned into Wolfman Jack and AM radio, through the songwriting of Curtis Mayfield and Howlin’ Wolf. After landing in San Francisco in 1977, he earned his stripes busking alongside the city’s finest street musicians before working his way into gigs with Oakland blues legends. Over three decades since, he and The Healers have shared stages with Taj Mahal, Los Lobos, George Thorogood, Gregg Allman, Etta James and John Hammond, among others, and a catalogue running from Kerosine through Soul Crusade has built him a devoted European following, including a previous album that topped the Euro-Americana Charts. None of that history is incidental to Used Parts. It’s the whole engine of the record. This is an album that sounds like it was earned rather than written to spec, and that authenticity comes through in every performance.

Musically, Used Parts finds Halford and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Adam Rossi, alongside bassists Mike Anderson and Kevin T. White, pushing the band’s country-rock and blues elements a little deeper into the mix than on recent records, giving the whole album a rawer, more direct feel. Guest contributions add real colour throughout: pedal steel and guitar from Tom Heyman (whose résumé includes work with Alejandro Escovedo and Chuck Prophet), bass from Myron Dove (Santana), and vocal and instrumental turns from Halford’s own children, Aaron and Hannah Halford, whose presence on several tracks adds a genuinely moving, personal thread to the record.

Opener “Bright Lights” sets the tone immediately with a cool, confident riff and Halford singing as the eternal “guitar man,” reflecting on a touring life spent “roaming around from town to town.” It’s worth noting, and it’s hard to unhear once you catch it, that there’s a real kinship between Halford’s phrasing here and Lukas Nelson’s work with Promise of the Real. Both singers carry that same warm, slightly weathered conviction that makes a well-worn story feel freshly lived. It’s a genuinely flattering comparison, and “Bright Lights” earns it from the first verse.

The title track follows, riff-driven and propelled by an insistent kick drum, and it distils the album’s whole philosophy into a few blunt, memorable lines. Halford has described it himself as a song of brutal self-reflection, not about starting over, but about rebuilding piece by piece with whatever’s left, “not perfection, but evolution”. It’s a theme he’s circled before across his catalogue, but rarely with this much unadorned clarity; the slightly worn edge in his voice carries more genuine weight here than any bigger dramatic gesture could.

But if there’s one track on Used Parts that deserves to stop listeners in their tracks, it’s “Mississippi Flyer”, and the story behind it is as good as the song itself. The tune was written by Bill Wyman, the former Rolling Stones bassist, who personally asked Halford to record it after becoming familiar with his music through a mutual friend and following his European tours closely. Wyman, a musician who has shared stages with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Stephen Stills and John Hammond, apparently liked the way Halford’s band grooved, and Halford’s response, by all accounts, was simply that it would be an honour.

That honour shows in the recording. Halford attacked the song with his signature slide guitar, gathered The Healers together, plugged into a vintage Sears and Roebuck tube amp, brought in a 1960s-era stand-up Kay bass, and cut the track live, a session that, fittingly, took the band on a real trip from California down through the Mississippi Delta and on to Muscle Shoals. The result is a mid-tempo shuffle built on slide guitar, an ode to the train of the title carrying its narrator toward better company and away from a “one horse town.” There’s a loose, unhurried groove running through the whole thing that feels genuinely of that place, that history, not an homage to Delta blues from a distance, but a band that went and found the sound where it lives. Knowing that a Rolling Stone handed Halford this song and trusted him to make it his own adds a real weight to every bar of it, and The Healers rise to that trust completely. It’s the clear emotional and musical high point of the record, and reason enough on its own to seek this album out.

The album doesn’t coast on that one highlight, either. “Corazón” slows things down into a warm, dreamy ballad built on slide guitar, keys, soulful backing vocals and a touch of Tex-Mex accordion, giving Hannah Halford’s vocal contribution real room to breathe. “High Mountain Soul” swings the other direction entirely, locking into a funky southern-soul groove that recalls 70s outfits like Wet Willie without ever feeling like pastiche. “Living Worthwhile” opens with a heavy kick-drum pulse and finds Halford asking hard questions about meaning and mortality with real vulnerability, while “Chasing Forgiveness” closes out the album’s emotional arc with soulful backing vocals and a narrator searching, plainly and without self-pity, for redemption.

Running through all of it is a band that has clearly logged enough shared miles to know exactly when to lean in and when to lay back, the interplay between Halford’s guitar work and Rossi’s drumming in particular feels less like accompaniment than conversation. It’s a record built on restraint as much as grit, and that balance is what gives it staying power.

Used Parts is a rich, generous, deeply human album from a songwriter who has spent thirty years figuring out exactly what he wants to say and how to say it without wasted motion. It’s a record for open roads and late nights, built on real stories, real scars, and, in “Mississippi Flyer”, one genuinely remarkable act of musical trust between two very different generations of American roots music. With his ninth European tour set for this autumn, Jeffrey Halford & The Healers show no signs of running out of road, and on this evidence, there’s no reason they should. A great, thoroughly rewarding album.

Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE

PARIS-MOVE, August 26th, 2026

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Tracklisting :
01.Bright Lights
02.Used Parts
03.Living Worthwhile
04.Don’t Turn Out the Lights
05.Rhythm of the Rails
06.Corazón
07.Chasing Forgiveness
08.High Mountain Soul
09.Mississippi Flyer
10.True North

Musicians:
Jeffrey Halford – vocals, guitars
Adam Rossi – drums, keyboards, percussion, vocals
Mike Anderson – bass
Kevin T. White – bass (tracks 1, 2, 3)

Guest musicians:
Myron Dove – bass (tracks 3, 4)
Aaron Halford – guitar and vocals (tracks 3, 4)
Hannah Halford – vocals (tracks 6, 7, 8)
Tom Heyman – pedal steel and guitar (tracks 3, 4, 9)

Marks Les notes
	AVERAGE / MOYEN
	GOOD / BON
	GOOD / BON
	VERY GOOD / TRES BON
	GREAT / COUP DE COEUR
	A MUST / INDISPENSABLE

Jeffrey Halford & The Healers – Used parts

Jeffrey Halford & The Healers – Used parts

Used Parts: Jeffrey Halford & The Healers Prove You Don’t Need to Start Over to Keep Moving Forward