"I, Flathead" will be the final album in Ry Cooder's California trilogy which began with 2005's "Chavez Ravine" and 2007's "My Name is Buddy." Nonesuch/Perro Verde Records will release the album and an accompanying novella on June 24.
Disc is an album of music by the fictional Kash Buk and his band the Klowns; novella tells the story of  Buk, Buk is  a salt flat racer and roadhouse musician, and his friend Shakey the alien. They venture into a  bygone era in California, taking in desert life, salt-flat racing,  seedy dance halls and amusement parks.
Native Angeleno Cooder, a musical alchemist whose travels have taken him from the Delta blues of Blind Blake and Alfred Reed to Timbuktu and Cuba and back to the Tex-Mex border, draws from country-Western music, popular mechanics magazines and science fiction films on "I, Flathead." The music includes a forbidden-race love song, a ghost drag racer tune, a circus story,  honky-tonk heart-ache ballads and an homage to steel guitar legends.
Cooder produced and wrote or co-wrote the songs. He sings and  plays mandolin, guitar, and bass. The musicians are: Joachim Cooder and Jim Keltner on drums; Rene Camacho on bass; Francisco Torres on trombone; Ron Blake and Jon Hassell on trumpet; Anthony Gil on bass sax; Flaco Jimenez on accordion, Gil Bernal on  tenor sax; Jared Smith on keyboards; Martin Pradler on electric piano and drums; and Juliette Commagere on vocals.
"I,  Flathead concerns change and disruption in a young, post-war do-it-yourself culture of outsiders. "Chavez Ravine," written about the area of town where the Brooklyn Dodgers built their stadium and displaced a Mexican-American community in the early '60s, examined loss of place and history. "Buddy," a cat, explored the loss of solidarity and unity.
Cooder won the  pop instrumental album Grammy in 2004 for "Mambo Sinuendo," a brilliant album with guitarist Manuel Galban, a member of the Cuban doo-wop act Los Zafiros from the early 1960s. He backed several members of the Buena Vista Social Club, which Cooder masterminded, when they made solo albums.