Riding high on a recent set of support shows for Tenacious D, one-man band Steel Beans probably couldn’t garner higher praise than what he’s received from the founder of his new label, APESHIT Records. “I’ll be damned if he ain’t the craziest MF I’ve seen in my life,” Anderson .Paak shared of the artist. “I’m excited to watch him bring back rock ’n’ roll and shake things up. The game really needs his energy right now.”
Steel Beans aims to do so with his newly announced self-titled record, which will be co-released with EMPIRE. The project documents the artist exploring his personality through a cracked and fractured lens—or maybe his “few dozen different personalities” through a perfectly intact lens. “This album is full of honest performances and ideas that I may not be able to pull off, but that’s the charm,” he notes. “Frankly, it’s full of mistakes, which is what the world needs now more than anything.”
The funky psych-rocker “Stowaway” serves as the project’s first single, both looking back to the raw riffs of Crimson and paving the way for a new generation of 21st century schizoid rock. “There’s a difference to the therapy of writing a song about something you’re going through, and writing something where you are myopic to what it means but it feels powerful, then you listen to it a month later and you can figure it out,” the artist philosophizes. “This way you’re learning something about yourself and where you fit into the world instead of the other way around. I think this is one of those songs that’s better if I don’t stigmatize it by saying what it's about in terms of lyrics. That would be putting a ceiling on it.”
He adds that one “wild guess” is that the new single is about “a court-jester prophet sent to save planet Earth, but the timing is off by a mere 50 years. So in a world dominated by apathy amid self-loathing, he instead mows lawns and writes songs that subliminally and cryptically tell his story.”
Yeah, that’s what we got out of it, too. Check out the psychedelic video for the track below, and expect Steel Beans out October 9.
