Announcement: new album "Topograph" out in January -- and two new songs today!

Happy fall, everybody!

Big news today: I'm happy to announce that after many long months of work on it, I'll be releasing my sixth studio album this winter. Topograph, which will be released on January 30th, 2026 (100 days from today!), comprises sixteen new geographically-inspired songs that are about as varied in style and subject matter as any I've made; I'm extremely excited for all of you to finally hear them. You can preorder the new album on CD or vinyl here, and you can be assured that I'll be telling you a lot more about it in the coming months. Topograph was produced by the great Dan Cardinal (who also worked on my previous records Bearings and The Trouble With Wilderness) and largely recorded in Boston, though parts of it came in from Vermont, Minnesota, Maine, Washington, western Massachusetts, and more. There's a whole lot of stuff packed into this thing.

Best of all, it looks like this. The cover art is an image called “Afternoon Dune," from a series called Shifting Landscapes by the wonderful artist Mary Gordon McFall, and I'm very grateful to her for letting me use it:

Two songs from the album are newly available to stream on all platforms as of this morning: the first one is "Aubade," inspired by a slow and chilly sunrise among the riverside bluffs of the upper Midwest's Driftless Area and composed as part of a really lovely collaboration with the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife & Fish Refuge I was able to do last year. I've been playing "Aubade" at most of my concerts for a while now, and I'm very pleased to finally have a recording out there:

The other song is "Quiet Corner," which I wrote as the result of a commission from the Yale-Myers Forest in northeastern Connecticut -- the nearly 8,000-acre forest is set within a strange, beautiful, and undulating glacial landscape which is made all the more kaleidoscopically diverse by the variety of forest management practices employed within it, and this song is meant to reflect the experience of wandering deeper and deeper into the forest, through one environment after another. Many thanks to my old pal Harris Paseltiner for playing cello on this song, and to everyone at the Yale School of the Environment who helped bring it into the world.

You can stream/download both of the new songs on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and anywhere else where you listen to music. And I hope you do! I'm very eager to hear what all of you think.

I'm just coming off a wild few weeks of zigzagging around for shows in northern and western Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire, West Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, and more (some of those places looked like this, this, and this, and while November and December look to be a bit calmer, I am looking forward to several events, like this one in Keene, NH next month with longtime Yankee Magazine editor Mel Allen. I'm also working right now on lining up a whole bunch of stuff for next year, and look forward to announcing a few of those dates soon.

Again, please consider streaming the two new songs – and preordering Topograph on CD and vinyl at my webstore! More songs from the new record will be tumbling out here and there between now and January, and I can't wait to talk to you about those when they happen.

Until then, thanks so much for your support – I hope you enjoy the new songs, and please share them around if you do! It helps a lot.

Best wishes from a rainy morning in Maine,

Ben