MAUI, HAWAII — Lonesome Cat — the moniker of Maui-based singer-songwriter, bassist, and guitarist Monty Oliver Anderson — announces the release of his debut album, Acoustic Mourning, out May 15, 2026 on his artist-run label Unsound Creations. Twelve tracks of rock, blues, and singer-songwriter craft built from real grief, real loss, and the particular devastation of losing the one presence that made everything survivable. This is not a record that softens its subject matter. It is a record that sits with it — and in doing so, speaks for everyone who has been there.
The story behind Acoustic Mourning deserves to be told in full.
The past few years dismantled Monty Oliver Anderson’s world piece by piece. He lost friends, family, pets, his job, and his marriage — each loss landing like another move in a Jenga tower that was already leaning. Through all of it, there was Batty: his cat of sixteen years, the constant, the warmth, the reason to believe things might still be okay. She had been with him through everything.
In the summer of 2024, Batty came down with a respiratory illness. On December 5th of that year, Anderson made the decision to end her suffering. What followed was an experience of grief so total it crystallised something he had always understood intellectually but had never felt in his body — not like this.
“Her passing crystalized the fact that everything we love will someday leave,” he says. “We are all going to die, and there is nothing we can do about it. This was the first time that the reality of our mortality — and the fact that we really don’t know where we are going next — crashed into me like a fist.”
Acoustic Mourning is the album that came from that place.
Anderson began music seriously in 2012 — a remarkable undertaking, given that he is blind, and taught himself music theory, guitar, vocals, recording, and mixing through sheer determination and a refusal to stop searching for methods that worked. In early 2026, having lost his job and finding himself with time and urgency in equal measure, he committed to music the way he commits to everything: completely. Ten hours a day. Seven days a week. Until the album was done.
“I put my heart and soul into this album,” he says, “and I dedicate it to the memory of all of my beloved pets and friends who have meant so much to me and who are now gone.”
Acoustic Mourning moves through its twelve tracks with the weight and honesty of a journal that was never meant to be kept private. Anderson writes, as he puts it, from “possibly the most common human experience — suffering, beauty, and mortality” — and he does so in the sonic language of rock and blues, where that subject matter has always found its most honest home.
Several tracks are written in what Anderson calls “cat language” — a tribute to Batty woven directly into the compositions, a way of speaking to and for someone who cannot answer back but who deserves to be addressed anyway. The lyrics throughout cut deep, reflecting a soul who has been through everything this world can throw at a person and is still here — not because it was easy, but because of an inner resilience that does not announce itself.
Anderson grew up in Arizona, moved to Maui with his father after high school, and went on to earn degrees in both Clinical Psychology and Law. He spent years working in the legal profession and the non-profit sector for persons with disabilities. His passion for animal welfare runs through everything he makes. He is 53 years old. He started playing bass at 13. He has been building toward this album for most of his life.
