B-Side Guys

Three albums, one shared side-profile portrait on every cover, and a twenty-five-year arc that Benjamin Jay Thomas says he never planned but recognizes in hindsight. Bring Forth took inherited hymns and rewrote them in his own voice. The Way Up took his own inherited faith apart piece by piece. Behind Your Eyes, the Stars Are Born is the record that comes after both of those, and it announces its intentions before a single lyric arrives: this is his most pop-leaning, joy-forward work after two decades spent in the quieter company of Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver comparisons, a bearded-guy indie folk lifer who says giving up on being cool opened something loose in him.

Opener “Sunrise” sets the record’s actual thesis in its bridge, “all of life is sacred, little by little we’re turning into starlight,” a line that returns almost word for word on “Welcome Back” later in the sequence, tying the album’s outward-reaching opening to its inward-turning back half with the same refrain. That’s not an accident. Thomas has described the record’s two-part structure, Solar tracks that live in the head and reach for meaning, Lunar tracks that live in the heart and reach for presence, as something that revealed itself to him during the making rather than something imposed from outside, and the recurring line works like a hinge between those two halves rather than a simple chorus callback.

The early songs live in the head first, working through argument and image before the record lets itself rest anywhere. “Is There A Life,” featuring Ms. Bright Sea, spends its whole runtime in open questions, “is there a right way to fight, is there a wrong reason to die,” refusing the certainty “Sunrise” just established a track earlier. “A World Of Our Own” tells an actual story, a kid named Steven who skates alone and gets warned away from by other parents, and turns that specific memory into a wider argument about inherited wisdom that Thomas now calls mostly useless, “planting the seeds from their own ruin, filling our bodies with fear.” It’s the most narratively grounded song on the record, and it earns the abstraction that follows it by giving the album’s ideas about institutional damage a face and a name first. “Come On, Time Machine” plays that same theme as pure whimsy, birds that forgot how to fly because they figured cars were faster, a world that shrunk to the size of an egg, the kind of image that only works if the songwriter actually trusts the childlike register rather than winking at it.

“Here With Me” is where the record’s tone shifts toward something steadier, a song about a companion who sees straight through the disguises Thomas admits to building, set against an image of losing control at highway speed and finding the ground again through someone simply sitting beside him. That steadiness carries into “Echo Of The Sun,” where the songwriting turns briefly self-aware, “it turns out the song had to get to know me first,” before landing on its own directive, “wake up, my love, you’re an echo of the sun.”

“The Joyful Eye of God” is the record’s most ambitious swing, a two-part piece that opens by mocking certainty itself, repeating “if you can’t see it, you can’t believe it” until the phrase curdles, before Part II dissolves into something closer to mysticism outright: “the light exists beyond a plane where we don’t need our separate names.” It’s the clearest musical expression of the theology Thomas describes in interviews, a divine located inside the people actually paying attention to each other rather than inside a building or a book. “The Wisdom,” featuring Mandy Hughes, follows directly after it in the sequence, leading into the record’s closing run.

“Heal Yourself, Heal the World,” featuring Targol and Nora B. Heath, grounds that same idea in the natural world, rivers mending their banks, trees sealing wounds in their own rings, before arriving at a line that could serve as the album’s whole argument in miniature, “duality itself a myth.” Closer “It Starts With A Pause” pulls all of it back down to the actual specifics of Thomas’s life, ending not on abstraction but on a direct address to family, “hello mom and dad, hello to my friends in California, Washington and good old Illinois,” which traces his own real geography, Chicago roots, a Southern California chapter, a current home in the Cascades, without ever naming it as autobiography. The gesture says more than the explanation would.

Across eleven tracks and eight albums, Thomas has earned the right to describe this one as arrival rather than departure. Behind Your Eyes, the Stars Are Born doesn’t argue its way to warmth. It keeps returning to the same handful of images, starlight, sunrise, being truly seen, until they stop sounding like metaphor and start sounding like something closer to a fact he’s decided to live inside.

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Behind Your Eyes, the Stars Are Born is available July 17th.