Luba Dvorak Crosses An Ocean to Retell The American Immigrant Story in Powerful New Album Holding Pattern

Adhyâropa Records is thrilled to announce Holding Pattern (ÂR00148), the new album by Czechoslovakia-born, Vancouver-raised, Brooklyn-honed, Houston-based, and thoroughly All-American country-folk songwriter Luba Dvorak. 

Dvorak was born in 1974 in Brno, Czechoslovakia (a country which no longer exists). At the age of 6, his family was forced to flee, at first to Yugoslavia where his father forged travel documents to allow them into Austria. “My parents understood the tension of the moment even if I didn’t at the time – you get caught, you're going to jail and who knows what else,” Dvorak says. “We just had our vacation clothes with us so we could maintain the ruse. So then we crossed the border and began the process of claiming refugee status.” After a year and a half in a refugee camp in Austria, they were finally allowed to emigrate to Vancouver, Canada, where he grew up.

Dvorak is a product of a prolific and distinguished musical family; in fact, if you recognize his famous surname, he is in fact a distant relative of the composer Antonin Dvorak. “The family told me they all just referred to him as Tony.” His father was involved in what was called the “tramping” scene back in Czechoslovakia. ”Public assembly over 10 people was illegal, so people would go out to the woods, build a bonfire, put on green army clothes, and sing Czech songs or translated American folk songs. It was the only way you could do it there, then. When we got to Canada, there were a lot of “tramps” there too, so we just continued that lifestyle and it’s how I was first introduced to music.”

Growing up in Vancouver, Dvorak was also introduced to a helping of American country and bluegrass, though it initially didn’t take. “Back then, I wanted to be Bruce Springsteen!” Dvorak says. “‘Born In The USA’ – that song had such power, and it really registered with me and my own experience.”

Springsteen-esque rock led to Tom Petty-inspired twang; fast-forward through a stint in the Roots and Americana musical cauldron of Brooklyn, and Dvorak found himself in Houston, Texas, where he encountered his two main collaborators on Holding Pattern. “I first met Ross Holmes when he played on a track from a previous album, and of course Ross is one of the great fiddle players in the world, and an outstanding mandolinist as well. Then I met Max Winningham when he was still really young, and now at age 28 he’s just an extraordinary virtuoso; I’ve never heard anyone play quite like him. So I knew I’d want to make a record with these two musicians, and that it would be coming from the Americana, folk influence I’d worked my way back around to loving. It had been in my bones the whole time, I guess.” The album was recorded live off the floor at Niles City Studio in Ft. Worth with producer Robert Ellis who also plays piano, and Jordan Richardson rounds out the studio band on drums.

But at that moment, as was becoming a pattern for Dvorak, a major political event shifted his course. “The election hit me really hard. We were in such a state of shock that literally the next day I decided to book the studio time and put the songs together that expressed how I felt, as an American, as a Texan, and especially as an immigrant who came to this country to escape the same kind of darkness that’s now growing roots on this side of the ocean.”

Indeed, Dvorak announces his intentions from the first lyric: “Woke up today in a daze / Everything around me had changed.” So begins the hard-charging title track and album opener. The core trio each take solo statements, rooting the music in familiar bluegrass and Americana vocabulary and experience, but sung from the perspective of one who escaped to it and found a home there. Dvorak is an artist who knows all-too-well the consequences of discarding it.

‘The Night Sweats’ goes even further in exploring Dvorak’s anxiety. “Thunderstorm brewin', dark clouds are comin', / Or is that just something they tell us on TV?” Later, he echoes the terror his own father must have felt when bringing his family to the land of freedom and prosperity: “I'll carry you away, always on my shoulders / And wake up with the night sweats so you don't have to.”

‘The Border’ makes these terrors explicit and manifest. Over Holmes’ twitchy mandolin, Dvorak sings, “I work on the border, I see what I see, / I work on the border and it's workin' on me.” And 2025 won’t hear a more searing statement on America’s renunciation of its own values than “From the shacks and the shanties come the hungry and poor, / Some to drown at the cross, some to suffer no more.”

The album’s closer, ‘I’d Lie To You For Your Love’ is delivered through a smirk that contains a bitter gospel about our post-truth world: “I'm a doctor, I'm a lawyer, I'm a movie star / I'm an astronaut and I own this bar / I'd lie to you for your love.” The song’s references to “Runnin' for president, I got money to burn,” and “My family comes from royalty / On my daddy's side,” take on an additional connotation when you know they’re being sung by the son of a proud family that came here with nothing, looking for the American dream, only to be lied to and denigrated by a millionaire’s son who became a billionaire by lying to his supporters about being one of them. 

Holding Pattern is a powerful statement by an artist with a strong sense of past, and an earned trepidation about the future. It’s more than just a collection of nine finely-crafted, brilliantly performed songs. It’s an essential statement, at a terrifying moment in the history of the nation and the world.

Artist: Luba Dvorak

Album Title:Holding Pattern

Label: Adhyâropa Records

Release Date: November 3, 2025 (single: ‘The Ghost’); November 17, 2025 (single: ‘Holding Pattern); December 5, 2025 (album: Holding Pattern)

Purchase: https://lubadvorak.bandcamp.com/album/holding-pattern

Performers: Luba Dvorak (guitar, vocals); Ross Holmes (fiddle, mandolin); Max Winningham (bass); Robert Ellis (piano); Jordan Richardson (drums)