Each American Aquarium album is best viewed as a slice of BJ Barham’s life. The frontman writes in the moment, and his music is a distillation of the world as he sees it, and the life he has carved for himself along with his wife, Rachael, and their eight-year-old-daughter, Pearl, in the increasingly-suburbanized Wendell, North Carolina, a half hour east of Raleigh. In the two years since the last Aquarium record, as he wrote and recorded what became New Ways to Lose, Barham has been thriving.
If Bueller were still around, that would be the takeaway from the 10-track, Shooter Jennings-produced record, which drops on Friday.
Aquarium’s 12th studio album showcases the band at the top of its game and Barham at the top of his craft as a songwriter. More than a decade into sobriety, and nearly that long into parenthood, Barham has a content life in his midcentury-era home a few blocks from downtown Wendell, and on the road, where he has cracked whatever code independent artists must crack to sustain a career. The rock-edged New Ways to Lose would reflect all of that — and maybe even cause longtime Aquarium fans to reconsider their “BJ Barham made me cry” T-shirts — were it not for Bueller.
