It began in a living room, or maybe several living rooms— with a flicker of light from a candle or two, surrounded by strangers who, after an evening of music, became strangers no more. This is not the way everyone might begin the process of crafting a new album: crisscrossing the country in an old van and relying on the kindness of brand-new friends with their eager ears and open homes. But this is the way Chadwick Stokes readied the songs for his second solo LP, The Horse Comanche: on the road and in front of his biggest fans, which is exactly how he likes it. Because the best music—like the revolutions it sometimes furnishes—starts in the uncharted spaces, gathered around together.

“I wanted to get to a place where the connection was as real as possible,” says Stokes on what came to be titled the Living Room tour. “It was simply the best way I could think of to battle-test new songs, to tour and have no middle man.”

With the aid of a renowned production team of Sam Beam (Iron and Wine), Brian Deck (Gomez, Josh Ritter, Modest Mouse) and Noah Georgeson (Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart), they took the music from the highway into the studio, recording in the Polar Vortex of Chicago, tapping into the intimate, urgent environment created on those living room floors. Together, they crafted a sonic warmth away from the frigid winds, weaving together the stories and pieces and lives taken from his time on the road and his fresh existence as a family man; of growth and struggle, of reactions to the changing (oftentimes, not in the right direction) political and social landscape around him.

The songs on The Horse Comanche are both urgent and delicate, melding a psychedelic spiral with steadfast folk; from the wistful pop-choir that ushers in “Hazy Maze,” to the eclectic percussion and tropicali beat of “Prison Blue Eyes,” to the sweeping “New Haven” that features guest vocals from Lucius, they’re a diverse snapshot into the mind and world of Stokes, a singer who lives equally in the internal and the external plane.