Album Announcement & "The Machine in the Garden"

Hi everyone,

Big news! I'm delighted to announce that this spring I'll be releasing my first new full-length album in almost four years. It's called The Trouble With Wilderness, and its first single, "The Machine in the Garden," was released on all platforms this morning. You can preorder a digital copy of the full album here (the ability to preorder CDs and vinyl will be coming soon), and you can (and should!) listen to the first song on Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music, Pandora, and all of the other places where you might listen to music. Please go check it out, and let me know what you think!

The new album came about as a result of a decision I made to try writing music about expressions of nature and wildness in the ordinary places that make up people's everyday lives, rather than making more songs about national parks, oceans, wildernesses, mountains, and other landscapes that are more exotic, remote, or uncommon. I found I was spending too much time on stage talking about places that most people would never get to see, and maybe, in the process, misrepresenting what I understand nature to be; this album is sort of an attempt to correct that. (I wrote a little more about that here.) The title of the new album comes from an essay by the same name by the environmental historian William Cronon, one of my favorite pieces of writing for many years now. Here's an excerpt from that essay, which gets right to the heart of what I wanted the album to be about:

Wilderness gets us into trouble only if we imagine that this experience of wonder and otherness is limited to the remote corners of the planet, or that it somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. Nothing could be more misleading. The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has never known an ax or a saw[...] The tree in the garden could easily have sprung from the same seed as the tree in the forest, and we can claim only its location and perhaps its form as our own. Both trees stand apart from us; both share our common world.

“The Trouble With Wilderness” (cover art by William Crosby)

The new album was produced, mixed, and mastered at Dimension Sound Studios in Boston by Dan Cardinal, a brilliant and thoughtful guy with a real genius for getting interesting noises out of a piano. We recorded the bulk of the album in July, and then did all the overdubs, mixing, and mastering remotely over the course of the next several months. Some sounds, including the piano on "Machine in the Garden," were recorded in Nashville with my friend Kevin Harper (during the same sessions that yielded this recording).

"The Machine in the Garden" is the first track on the record and a pretty good distillation of what I was trying to go for with the whole project, both sonically and conceptually. WBUR's Artery wrote a few very nice things about the track when they premiered it yesterday, so you can read a bit about the background of that song here if you're interested in learning more.

To celebrate these announcements, I'll be playing my first "Live from a Room" livestream concert in a while! Join me over on YouTube on Thursday, February 11th at 7pm EST to hear some of these new songs and plenty of the old ones, or just hang out virtually with me for a bit. You can also use the live-comment section to chime in about how it's going, or beg me to get a haircut if you happen to be my mom.

I recently made a Spotify playlist featuring a bunch of my music (now including the new track), mixed in with a handful of songs by other people that I've played on over the years—you can listen to that here if you're into it. And a lot of you have been buying the sheet music for "Montreal Song," which is very cool: that's here if any others are interested. Finally, as per tradition, here are some recent photos: some pine trees at a construction site, a cool fence, a floodplain, a scene from the New England Trail and a disc of ice.

Thanks for everything, you guys. Working on this album has been a bit of a lifesaver this year—sort of a flagpole to cling onto during a hurricane—and while I'm sad I don't get to chip away at it anymore, I'm absolutely thrilled that I can finally begin sharing it with you.

In the meantime, I hope to see you via YouTube on the 11th! Please stay well out there, and I hope you're all weathering the winter okay.

Yours,
Ben