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Ben Arnold is a lifer.  

For decades, he's been creating his own version of amplified American roots music, broadcasting that sound from venues across America and Europe. He turns a new page with XI, a roots-rock record that finds the road warrior bridging the gap between personal insights and universal statements. Intimate one minute and anthemic the next, XI highlights just how wide-ranging Arnold's songwriting has become over the past quarter-century. 

"I laid myself bare with this record. There's relationships and compromise. There's places where you have to give up or give in. And there's places where you have success as well as failure," says Arnold, who signed a major-label deal with Columbia Records in the 1990s before embracing the freedom of hard-won independence during the decades that followed. Along the way, he also released albums with collaborative projects as diverse as US Rails and Pistol For Ringo, continuously exploring music from new angles, establishing himself not only as a solo artist, but as a bandmate, co-writer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and educator, too. By the 2020s, he'd already contributed to more than 30 albums. When the Covid-19 pandemic brought everyday life to a halt, though, Arnold found himself stuck at home, unable to continue collaborating with others. Looking to make sense of an unsteady world, he dug into his craft — and into himself.  

"I wrote country songs, folk songs, love songs, Christmas songs, and songs based in my own socio-political frustrations," he remembers. Some tunes were written in his hometown of Philadelphia, whose long history of R&B and soul music had inspired his past two records: Lost Keys and Sunday Morning Meltdown. Others were written in hotel rooms in upstate New York, where Arnold began traveling every month to visit his terminally ill mother. Songs like "Long Tall Shadow" and the Springsteen-sized anthem "Catch the Lighting" sprang to life during those bittersweet trips. "I was looking back on my past, measuring the distance between my younger life and where I'm at now, thinking about all the in-betweens," he says. While looking inward, he also wrote love songs like "All The Love In My Heart" — an elegant, wedding-worthy waltz, laced with pedal steel and upright piano — and the soulful "Cools My Rage."  

As Arnold took stock of the changes in his own life, the outside world continued to change, too. "My America" and "Not Fair" were written while political protests erupted across the country, inspiring Arnold to dig deep into his own thoughts of patriotism, pride, and social justice. He'd already written about national politics on albums like Sunday Morning Meltdown, but XI quickly became something different, with tracks like the New Orleans-flavored protest song "Build a Wall" sharing equal space on an album that also explored personal territory.  

Ever the traveler, Arnold headed to Los Angeles once restrictions lifted. There, he reunited with producer Shane Smith (his musical partner in the band Pistol For Ringo, as well as engineer of Los Lobos' acclaimed record Tin Can Trust) while simultaneously working on the East Coast with Barrie Maguire (The Wallflowers, Natalie Merchant, and more). What began as a casual recording session at Hetson Sound, the SoCal studio owned by Circle Jerks guitarist Greg Hetson, quickly turned into something more substantial, with Arnold assembling a band of longtime friends and collaborators from multiple different genres. Others contributed to the sessions remotely — including Pete Thomas, longtime drummer for Elvis Costello and the Attractions, who tracked songs like "Catch The Lightning," "Anywhere But Here," and "Peace, Love & Understanding" (which found him warmly commenting, "I love this song! You know I played on the first one!?") from home. Back in Philadelphia, Ben and Maguire recorded songs like the gorgeously heartbreaking "My America" in a series of fast, inspiring takes, breathing new life into Arnold's timeless influences.   

"There's everything from Bob Dylan to Buddy Holly to Bruce Springsteen to a little bit of the Beach Boys in there," Arnold says of the record, whose arrangements make room for electric guitar, swirling organ, heartland hooks, and the warm, worn-in rasp of his own road-tested voice. "I used to feel nervous about honoring my influences, but I've become less on-guard about it over the years. It's all folk music. This form of American popular music has been handed down over generations, and we're all privy to it. We all own it." 

Arnold certainly owns it with XI. The album reaffirms his spot in the long lineage of hard-touring songwriters who blur the lines dividing musical traditions, flying somewhere below the mainstream and high above the American underground, swirling together their own combination of folk, blues, soul, rock & roll, and classic pop. He isn't reinventing the wheel; instead, he's redefining the sound that kickstarted his career during the early 1990s, sharpening his songwriting with each release. In an industry that's forever changing, he's remained a constant force… and with XI, Ben Arnold reminds us that there's strength in numbers.