Maverick songwriter Howe Gelb has launched Giant Giant Sand - the new incarnation of his loose collective Giant Sand - and previewed their new album Tucson with a track giveaway. 

Gelb describes Tucson as "a country-rock opera" revolving around around a "semi-grizzled man with overt boyish naïveté" who sets off to escape the trappings of hometown life and embarks on a life-changing road trip: eschewing all his worldly goods and leaving behind what he has loved, encountering jail at the Mexican border, finding new old love at a train station saloon, all while "the end of the world" provides the landscape game changer.

• Tucson is released on 11 June on Fire Records [1]