I didn’t set out to write a concept album called Love.

In a way, I discovered it hiding among songs I had already written and set aside.

Most of the 18 songs on the album were written over the past ten or twelve years. Some existed as finished songs. Some were home demos I had almost forgotten about. A few had already been released in earlier forms. Others were unfinished pieces that were interesting but mostly abandoned.

At some point, as I started listening back through all of that material, I began to notice connections.

Songs written years apart seemed to occupy different moments in the same emotional journey. One captured the intoxication of falling in love. Another belonged much later, at the point where familiarity had begun to turn into strain. Others seemed to live in the aftermath of a relationship: grief, resentment, rebound, reflection, acceptance.

And then there were songs that seemed to belong to the other side of that experience—the gradual reopening to the possibility of love.

The creative challenge became one of curation.

Which songs belonged in this particular story? Which didn’t? Where should one act end and another begin? What happens if one song is placed immediately after another? Could an older song take on a different meaning simply because of where it appeared in the sequence?

That process became one of the most enjoyable parts of making the album.

Songs I had thought of as separate works began to feel like scenes. Lyrics written years apart started answering one another. Material that had once felt incomplete suddenly had somewhere to go.

Eventually, I started seeing the project less as a conventional album and more as something akin to a Broadway musical.

There is no script behind it, no fixed cast of characters, and no stage production notes. The songs suggest encounters, departures, confrontations, reversals, private reflections and resolutions. When I was working on it, I liked to imagine lighting and staging, and how they might be performed by different actors.

That was when the three-act structure really started to make sense.

The first act moves through attraction, intimacy and eventual fracture. The second occupies the uncertain territory after the collapse. The third begins the movement toward renewal and the possibility of loving again.

It is not meant to tell one literal story, and I’m not especially interested in telling listeners exactly who is speaking to whom.

I’d rather leave some of that open to my listeners.

So, I guess sometimes you set out to write an album. Sometimes, apparently, you find one. Love comes out September 24.

The instant grat track and opening song “What You Know” is now available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

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.