Music lovers have cause for celebration: one of this era’s best songwriters, John K. Samson (of the much-lamented The Weakerthans) is returning from Winnipeg’s tundra with new album Winter Wheat, his first since 2012’s Provincial (our No. 3 Best Album of 2012). Evidently “inspired by the search for connection and community… and our individual and collective struggles with addictions to drugs, screens, and fossil fuels,” Winter Wheat will be available via Anti-Records on October 21st.

To entice your ears, Samson has unveiled a great new song, Postdoc Blues, which you can listen to below. In the song and the album’s tracklist (below) we hear and see that some of Samson’s totemic touchstones (Winnipeg, Highway 1) and characters (Virtue the Cat) are endearingly continued on the new album. Similarly Provincial’s Master’s Thesis–writer and his “controller” and “hard drive” yield to the Postdoc Blues and its “dongles.” Samson presents another character seeking community and hope while existing in an isolated, digitized world.

Samson has said that in Postdoc Blues he “wanted to see that character move beyond the immediate comforts of screens and solitude, and catch sight of the larger picture—that we need to keep working to build a community that will care for the world and for each other, and that there can be real joy in that labor. Postdoc Blues is also one of several songs on this record that I wrote in response to Neil Young’s 1974 album On The Beach. Young was uncannily prescient about our current addictions to screens and drugs and fossil fuels and nostalgia.”

We are thrilled by the new song and can’t wait for the album, which was co-produced by Jason Tait (The Weakerthans drummer), along with Samson’s partner, Christine Fellows, and also features Greg Smith (The Weakerthans bass player) and much of it was recorded by The Weakerthans sound tech Cam Loeppky.

You can pre-order Winter Wheat HERE.

John K. Samson – Winter Wheat – Track Listing:

1. Select All Delete
2. Postdoc Blues
3. Winter Wheat
4. Requests
5. Oldest Oak at Brookside
6. Capital
7. 17th Street Treatment Centre
8. Vampire Alberta Blues
9. Carrie Ends the Call
10. Fellow Traveller
11. Quiz Night at Looky Lou’s
12. Alpha Adept
13. Prayer for Ruby Elm
14. VPW 13 Blues
15. Virtute at Rest