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Sep 09, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Dean Engle

Trace Mountains (the project of New York’s Dave Benton) is releasing a new album, House of Confusion, on October 22 via Lame-O. Now he has shared its second single, “7 Angels.” Listen to it below.

Benton had this to say about the new single in a press release: “‘7 Angels’ is very representative of House of Confusion on the whole. It was written pretty deep into the writing process, at a time when a lot of the album’s themes had already been established. It’s usually at this point in the writing process when songs come out the most naturally for me, and they are therefore usually quite simple. I think this song distills a lot of lyrical themes from the record—the passing of time, a change of heart, the sometimes wistful feeling of being on the road— in a fairly straightforward but questioning way that feels perhaps more universal than some of the other songs on the album. And that, to me, makes it feel like a nice introductory listen. Make of it what you will!”

Previously Trace Mountains shared the album’s first single, “America,” via a video for it. “America” was one of our Songs of the Week.

House of Confusion is the third Trace Mountains album and the follow-up to 2020’s Lost in the Country. It was recorded in the winter of 2021 in various locations—“a studio in the foothills of the Shawangunk Ridge in New York, a home along the Rondout Creek of the Hudson Valley, a Brooklyn apartment, and a small shared music workspace in Denver, Colorado” is how a press release describes them.

Benton was aided in the recordings by his regular backing band—Jim Hill (guitar, keys), Greg Rutkin (drums), and Susannah Cutler (voice, mellotron). Also joining in were Bernard Casserly (bass), J.R. Bohannon (pedal steel, guitar), David Grimaldi (guitar - tracks four and five), and Ryan Jewell (drums, marimba - track four).

Benton lost his job due to the pandemic and so found himself with the time to quickly follow-up Lost in the Country. “I was used to waking up early for my warehouse job, so when I got laid off, I just kept up that schedule and implemented another daily regimen focused on improving my guitar playing and writing songs,” he explains in the press release.

“I was on the road in my mind,” he adds, “thinking back on my life as a musician—my successes, my failures—and I was reflecting on the ever-ongoing process of moving on that my life has been made up of.”

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