A new full-length album is coming in 2019 from singer-songwriter Mack Starks.

His first release since 2006, the collection sounds fresh and is brimming with crafted wordplay and emotional immediacy, each song mining some inner landscape that all of us tread but rarely discuss.

“What naturally comes out of me as a songwriter, I think, are the feelings and instinctual knowledge that bubble up from hidden places in my mind, and I think, in human minds generally. I try to grab those images before I define them, before I decide where they fit into my beliefs or personal narrative. I sort of let them steer themselves. I don’t think these songs are obtuse, at least I hope they aren’t. You know that feeling when someone says something that strikes you because you thought you were the only one to ever think it? That’s sort of what I aim for in songwriting.”

But to listen to these songs, it isn’t like you don’t know what they’re about. It’s just that they have layers of implicit meaning under the surface. On the surface, there’s one about experiencing joyful abandon on a commercial airline flight, two or three about the struggle between alienation and connection in love, one about digging for essential truths in dark times, another about how Pete Seeger cleaned up the Hudson River.. oh, and one about a father and son who run a commercial pony ride. On Bright Ideas, perhaps the song with the album’s most impressionistic lyrics, we are asked to imagine time as a string, tied around us and pulling us forward at a fixed pace that we either embrace or resist and get yanked. 

It’s always tricky to place Mack’s music in the array of genres. He grew up in Nashville in the 1980s — which meant having a vague background awareness of Waylon Jennings while listening to The Clash, Talking Heads, and REM. Finally “getting” Bob Dylan, and then Leonard Cohen, came a few years later.

“In retrospect, I grew up during a rich period of country music, but I had zero interest in it. I guess my friends and I fancied ourselves urban alterna-kids. Country music was antithetical to who we wanted to be. Gram Parsons’ Grievous Angel turned my head around when I was in my mid-20s and living someplace else. But being a native Nashvillian, I’ve always felt like my music sounds very Nashville. When I was growing up, there were great local bands like Walk The West, The Questionnaires and Raging Fire. Bill Lloyd’s Feeling The Elephants left a deep impression. These artists were getting played on college radio and occasionally they’d play all-ages shows I could go to. To me, they represented what Nashville actually sounded like.”

In the late 90s, Mack fronted a band called Farmer Not So John, which released two records on Compass. The band unglamorously toured in a van, mostly around the South, made it onto the then-fledgling Americana charts and then fell to pieces just after releasing “Receiver,” produced by Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket, The Decemberists, Laura Veirs).

“It was a blow. I had put all my eggs in this basket. All I ever wanted was to be in a band that made records and played shows. We were starting to be able to do that, slowly but surely. But it’s next to impossible to keep a band together for long. I have the deepest admiration for anyone who pulls it off.”

After the band broke up, Mack recorded and self-released two solo records — Elsewhere (2003) and Blind Spot (2006). But things got pretty heavy with the pressure of trying to make a living in music, the forced narcissism of self-promotion (Mack is not a natural at this), a divorce and a bit of over-indulgence led to an indefinite hiatus from recording music and playing shows.

“I felt I needed to do things differently, and particularly to focus on things that were not about me. The dark clouds had gotten so thick that even making music became tainted by a sense or desperation” Mack says.” I hoped then and know now that I would find my way back to music — but I never again want to be compelled by either fear or by ego. Now that I have a healthier and more balanced life, I understand that making music is just a natural extension of who I am. But it took a while to get here. I used to believe I had to suffer for it.”

The yet-to-be-titled new record was co-produced and recorded by Dave Coleman. Sonically, the music is built on familiar terrain for Mack – mashing together countrypolitan colors like steel guitars and strings with the traces of 80s college radio — in service of perhaps Mack’s most tightly crafted songs to date.

“The older, family-man version of me is more patient with running down a song idea. I used to just feel like a lightning bolt had to deliver a song in a flash of inspiration or it was just no use. A couple of these new songs arrived just this way. I just happened to be in the right place when they showed up. But with others, I am more methodical and more patient than I used to be. I turn phrases inside out and upside down, like a rubik’s cube, until they start to make me feel something. And that feeling, that’s what I trust.”