Written very slowly during a period of deep personal upheaval, In All Directions tells stories of place and displacement. An imperfect travelogue, it is about finding (and failing to find) one’s footing between the flighty promise of elsewhere and the insistent pull—sometimes romantic, sometimes burdensome—of what you’ve already left behind.

It tries to get close to things, to handle the details of the world with care and precision and unblinking honesty; to see the fullness of what something is, in its place, even if that place is already receding, turning away from us. Or dimming as we turn away from it.

Rooted in the rhythms and textures of traditional country and western, it taps the hazy atmospherics of recent folk-pop and the acidity of contemporary indie and alternative. With a generous assist from producer Sam Plecker, it tries to map an elastic and uneven landscape where irony does not oppose sincerity, where humor is both acerbic and homely, and where intimacy grows from the same dirt as alienation. It seeks folk ways in gay bars and dark rooms, and cinema in old-growth forests.

In All Directions begins with a question that grows from a memory of diminishment: “Do you remember just how you lost your body?” It ends with a mantra, which is like an answer that refuses the question: “I extend in all directions. My body is a plane. I am all the things I’m made of. My body is a plane.” It’s a small effort to think and feel deeply about everything that happens and all the places in between.