"The Trouble With Wilderness"

Hi everybody,

I'm absolutely thrilled to announce that my new album, The Trouble With Wilderness, was released everywhere this morning and is now available to download or stream wherever it is that you listen to music! Head here to stream the album on the platform of your choice, here to read more or download it digitally, or here to order a copy on CD or vinyl.

I loved writing and recording this album. For me it was a conscious pivot away from writing about a certain kind of landscape, and the twelve songs on it are each intended to explore the ways that nature and wildness are essential parts of ordinary, everyday places, and not necessarily things that you should have to travel someplace remote or exotic to experience or understand. It’s music inspired by a very different set of ideas from what I’m used to writing about, and I’m enormously proud of how it came out: these songs about weeds and gardens and sidewalk cracks feel honest and intimate to me, and they contain some of my favorite sounds and moments of any that I’ve ever been able to put on a record.

I’ll talk more about the album in the days and months to come, but for now I'd just like to offer many, many thanks to all the people who helped me make this thing, and to my friends and colleagues who weighed in to offer musical, sonic, design, logistical, or conceptual advice and feedback along the way. I’m very grateful for how collaborative this project has felt.

If you're interested in more background information about the album, I have two excellent new places to direct you: first, I was honored to be featured yesterday on the latest episode of the podcast Outside/In (one of my favorite shows for years now). I talked with Taylor Quimby, one of the show's producers, about how and why I started writing music about landscape and my thinking behind the new record specifically, and we dove a bit into the essay from which it takes its title. You can listen to the episode here or wherever it is that you listen to podcasts.

I was also recently "co-interviewed" by my friend Boyce Upholt, a thoughtful and brilliant writer based in Louisiana with whom I always love talking about this kind of stuff. It's a bit of a deeper dive, and we both had a really good time shooting thoughts back and forth to each other in a shared text document; he describes the result as "an essay-as-conversation, conducted via Google Docs". It's posted in its original form at his newsletter's site, here, and I've also posted it in the "interviews" section of my own site, here. (And you should consider subscribing to Boyce's newsletter, too; it's consistently thought-provoking and excellent.)

That's all for now. Again, please stream The Trouble With Wilderness here, download it here, and/or order a physical copy here! Thanks so much for all your support through this crazy year. I can't wait to see you soon, and I can't tell you how much I hope you'll enjoy the new record. Please let me know what you think.

Yours as always,
Ben

PS. I don't want to overload this thing with too much extra stuff this time around, but here are some pictures: I recently got to be a fake Muppet, marvel at some good-looking rocks, and experience an almost overwhelming sense of relief. (Wishing you all the same, with that last one!)