Looks Like Rain

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{{Use mdy dates|date=May 2025}}

{{Infobox album

| name = Looks Like Rain

| type = Album

| artist = Mickey Newbury

| cover = Looks Like Rain cover.jpg

| alt =

| released = September 1969

| recorded = 1969

| venue =

| studio = Cinderella Sound, Nashville, Tennessee

| genre = Progressive country

| length = 37:35

| label = Mercury

| producer = Bob Beckham and Jerry Kennedy

| prev_title = Harlequin Melodies

| prev_year = 1968

| next_title = Frisco Mabel Joy

| next_year = 1971

| misc = {{Singles

| name = Looks Like Rain

| type = studio

| single1 = San Francisco Mabel Joy

| single1date = September 1969

}}

}}

{{Music ratings

| rev1 = AllMusic

| rev1Score = {{Rating|5|5}}{{cite web |first=Thom |last=Jurek |title=It Looks Like Rain – Mickey Newbury |url={{AllMusic|class=album|id=r107943|pure_url=yes}} |accessdate=October 28, 2019 |publisher=AllMusic}}

|rev2 = Christgau's Record Guide

|rev2Score = B−{{cite book|last=Christgau|first=Robert|author-link=Robert Christgau|year=1981|title=Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies|publisher=Ticknor & Fields|isbn=089919026X|chapter=Consumer Guide '70s: N|chapter-url=https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_chap.php?k=N&bk=70|access-date=March 8, 2019|via=robertchristgau.com}}

}}

Looks Like Rain is a 1969 concept album by singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury. After recording his debut album with RCA, Newbury was dissatisfied with the resulting album and left RCA to pursue a style closer to his tastes. Recorded at Cinderella Sound, as his next two albums would be, the result is widely considered his first real recording and represents a peak in the singer songwriter movement, especially for Nashville. The sound and style of the record would be highly influential during the Outlaw Movement during country music in the 1970s especially on albums by David Allan Coe and Waylon Jennings. Linking the tracks with delicate arrangements and liberal amount of atmosphere (almost all tracks feature rain sound effects), the record contains some of Newbury's most celebrated compositions including "She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye", "33rd of August", "I Don't Think Much About Her No More", and "San Francisco Mabel Joy". AllMusic's review of the album concludes, "Looks Like Rain is so fine, so mysterious in its pace, dimension, quark strangeness and charm, it defies any attempt at strict categorization or criticism; a rare work of genius."

Looks Like Rain was collected for CD issue on the eight-disc Mickey Newbury Collection from Mountain Retreat, Newbury's own label in the mid-1990s, along with nine other Newbury albums from 1969 to 1981. In 2011, it was reissued again, both separately and as part of the four-disc Mickey Newbury box set An American Trilogy, alongside two other albums recorded at Cinderella Sound, Frisco Mabel Joy and Heaven Help the Child. This release marks the first time that Looks Like Rain has been released on CD in remastered form, after the original master tapes (long thought to have been destroyed in a fire) were rediscovered in 2010.