On New Ways to Lose, BJ Barham Finds What’s Worth Fighting For
What happens to angry young men when they grow older?
That’s the question at the heart of New Ways to Lose, the new album from American Aquarium.
Artists who survive long enough eventually confront that question. Few have a compelling answer.
American Aquarium founder, frontman and principal songwriter BJ Barham does.
For two decades, Barham has found songs in broken people and broken places, dreams that don’t quite work out and towns that never got the factory back.
More than a decade sober, Barham is married, raising a daughter in Wendell, North Carolina. He runs his own label and still packs record orders on his dining room table. Last year, concerned about the future of his adopted hometown, he didn’t just write songs about it. He ran for town council.
Having something worth protecting has made Barham a more urgent songwriter.
The album opens with “Dollar General,” where Barham surveys a town that’s slowly disappearing. When he sings, “It ain’t left vs. right, it’s bottom vs. top,” he’s less interested in ideology than community. The song isn’t looking for villains nearly as much as it’s mourning what has been lost—and insisting that it’s still worth fighting for.
The best songwriters don’t spend their careers repeating themselves. Nor do they abandon the qualities that made them worth hearing in the first place. Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams and Chrissie Hynde have all continued to evolve while staying true to themselves. Their music has grown richer because life has given them more to write about. Barham is beginning to occupy that same territory.
New Ways to Lose refuses to confuse seriousness with solemnity. The songs wrestle with economic decline, grief, family and memory, but producer Shooter Jennings never lets the record collapse under that weight. The guitars still roar. The rhythm section rolls. Jennings understands that songs about loss don’t have to sound like defeat.
Not every song is turned up to 11.
“Can’t Into Could” trades outrage for resilience. “4×60” looks back with affection rather than nostalgia, recalling a younger North Carolina without pretending it was somehow better. It has some of John Hiatt’s observational warmth. Barham isn’t yet Hiatt’s equal as a craftsman (who is?), but he increasingly finds the extraordinary in ordinary lives.
“Favorite Hello,” Barham’s heartbreaking farewell to the family dog, sneaks up on you. One minute you’re tapping the steering wheel. The next you’re wondering why your eyes suddenly aren’t quite dry.
In “Just Like You,” Barham imagines his daughter trying to know the grandmother she’ll never meet. When he sings, “I wish she could get to know more than just your name,” it’s a simple line that carries the weight of generations.
The heart of the album is “Out There in the Dark.”
“I used to think the world was out to get me / ’Til I started shouldering the blame.”
That’s perspective, not surrender.
“I refuse to sit back idly / Mindlessly playing the cards we’re dealt.”
Those two lines say a lot about BJ Barham.
That conviction also explains why American Aquarium is one of the best live bands in Americana.
I’ve left John Moreland concerts deeply moved but emotionally exhausted. I’ve never left an American Aquarium show that way. Barham is having too much fun. So is his band. He doesn’t ask audiences to admire his convictions from a distance. He invites them to sing them back at full volume. The result isn’t escapism. It’s community.
The closing “Bad Habits” looks back over the life Barham has built—not just a career, but a family, a hometown and a community. It ends with the line that quietly unlocks the entire album:
“You gotta find the things in life worth bleeding for.”
Find more details here: http://www.americanaquarium.com
Enjoy some of our previous coverage here: Late Night First Listen: American Aquarium and River Shook
The album was produced by Shooter Jennings with engineering by David Spreng, assistant engineering by Zachary Zajdel, mixing by Trina Shoemaker and mastering by Pete Lyman.
Musicians on the album are BJ Barham on lead vocals and guitar; Shane Booker on acoustic and electric guitar and background vocals; Alden Hedges on bass; Ryan Van Fleet on drums and percussion; Neil Jones o guitar; Hank Long on organ, piano, synthesizer, background vocals and celesta; Ed Wynne on baritone and tenor saxophone; Jon Papenbrook on trumpet and flugelhorn; Roch Bordenave on trombone and Alden Hedges on background vocals. Songs were written by BJ Barham, with some co-written with Collin Nash and Lori McKenna.
Losing Side Records / Thirty Tigers.
Mark Pelavin, a failed retiree, is a writer, consultant and music in St. Michaels, MD. His newsletter, A Feather in the Wind, is at https://markpelavin.substack.com/.