All of this won me over when I started listening to Chris Maxwell’s first solo record, Arkansas Summer. Plus it was, sonically, kind of heaven, since Maxwell is a quintuple threat: gifted songwriter, singer, guitarist, producer, arranger.

That record didn’t sound exactly confessional but I knew it was deep and personal. It seeped through. In some songs he was writing about family—his people from Morrilton, Arkansas. It was not folksy or cloying, the way that kind of thing can sometimes be, and it was sometimes funny and often dark. I related. On paper my upbringing was much less rough around the edges, and I was not a small-town southerner, but let’s just say there were a lot of squirrel carcasses out in our garage at a certain point (that happens up north, too), and plenty of dysfunction. Some things just connect.

It has the personal songs and “the pop songs,” as Maxwell puts it. It has range and luxuriousness—a horn section, strings, lap steel, shimmering touches in the vocals, and just enough of the blistering guitar from the first record. Did I mention beauty? “Walking Through The Water” has a lush, spreading Bacharachian splendor, a song about Maxwell’s troubled younger brother, who died last year, and the ways that an addict can bring nearly everyone down with him. “All heads shake / All hearts break / All hands wave goodbye.” Another song, “Cause and Effect,” describes a car accident, which I find out from Maxwell is based on an actual teenage experience of spinning out of control one day while riding in a car driven by his best friend Wade. Wade died in the crash.

Maxwell can tell you all this in a gentle, even-handed sort of way. Is he trying to keep himself from flinching or is he doing this as a kindness to you? Hard to tell. Like when he mentions a crazy Christmas when his stepfather held the family hostage at gunpoint. It sounds so absurd you don’t know quite how to react. He still looks kind of baffled himself. Now he’s got a beautiful wife and son and he’s baffled by that good luck, too, which he’s also written songs about—happy songs. But “Song Turns Blue,” which is where he says this record started—he calls it the “fulcrum song”—is about dealing with a particularly challenging period of depression in his life.

“I was trying to not let it take me down. I’ve experienced enough unpleasant things to know that this was eventually going to become part of the fabric of who I was. If I could let it flow through me without attaching my entire identity to it, I could get through it okay. I wanted to write a song more about the process of assimilating what I was going through at the time and how it was no different than what everyone does to survive. The song became about soaking up everything—the good and the bad and embracing it.”

He wrote, recorded, and mixed this record with the help of drummer/producer Jeff Lipstein in his studio, Goat House, which sits next to his red house in the Catskill woods of New York, where he has lived for almost twenty years now. It’s close to a wide stream, which looks a little deep-southern if you happen to see it at dusk. He writes and records music for TV in the studio, and makes other people’s records there. For New Store No. 2 , he knew how to round up the talent, which is a talent all its own. On here he’s got Cindy Cashdollar, Rachel Yamagata, Marco Benevento, Amy Helm, Zack Djanikian, Conor Kennedy, David Baron, Mark Sedgwick, Jay Collins, Aaron Johnston, Jesse Murphy, Cheme Gastelum, and Larry Grenadier, among others, along with longtime collaborator Ambrosia Parsley.