On September 24, I’ll be releasing my fifth album, Love.

This one is a little different.

Love is an 18-song concept album organized into three volumes, loosely following a three-act structure. It’s a series of vignettes organized around a classic story arc, beginning with attraction, discovery and falling in love; moving through tension, separation and the difficult period that follows; and eventually arriving at recovery, renewal and the possibility of falling in love again.

The first song I’m sharing from the album is “What You Know,” released September 3.

It’s an adaptation of a song I released previously, but in the context of Love it takes on a different role. I think of it almost as an overture: an opening into the emotional world of the album as it unfolds across the three acts.

One of the unusual things about Love is that all of these songs were written at different times over a period of several years. Some are songs I’ve already released but revisited and rearranged, but many were finished home demos in my archive. A few others were incomplete sketches of songs that I finished for the album.

The concept album idea emerged late last year, when I began revisiting a bunch of my old material and realized that there was a thematic line running through them that could serve as a collection.

The real challenge of making this record has been deciding what songs to include, giving it a consistent feel musically, and deciding how the songs should be ordered so that they formed a dramatic arc.

Over the next few weeks, leading up to the album release, I’ll write a little more about that process—how the songs came together, how the three-act structure emerged, and why I eventually began to imagine Love as something almost like the score to an imaginary musical.

For now, “What You Know” is the instant grat track. Available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.