[Photography by Joshua Black Wilkins]
Seth Walker has announced his eleventh album, I Hope I Know, to be released May 20th, 2022 on Royal Potato Family. It’s the North Carolina-based singer/songwriter’s third studio collaboration with producer Jano Rix. The album’s first single, “The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be” has also been released and Walker will support the album with a U.S. tour beginning in May.
I Hope I Know might best be described as Walker’s “’round-midnight album”. Written in the midst of a breakup, relocating from his home in Nashville, TN to Asheville, NC, and the enduring mental struggles of the pandemic, it’s a reckoning with “heartbreak, moving across states and coming to terms with the uncertainty of the future”. He credits the practice of “search and surrender” for making the album, a “quest for new meaning in things he may never fully understand”.
Walker comments further:
This last year and a half has personally cracked me open. In many ways, for the first time, I’m observing myself and how I relate to the music, how I sit with the feeling, the emotion, my shadow and light. I have always been in this place of action, and finally, when all this happened, I found myself in a place of relinquishing—an active state of inaction.
The first sessions for I Hope I Know began in 2019, but it wouldn’t be until the second half of 2020 when Walker would truly dive into the writing and recording process. Oliver Wood, Jano Rix’s bandmate in The Wood Brothers, cowrote three of the songs, as did Walker’s longtime songwriting partner Gary Nicholson, while Jarrod Dickenson also contributed to one song.
Tour Dates:
5/19 – Dallas, TX – The Kessler *
5/20 – Austin, TX – 04 Center *
5/21 – Houston, TX – The Heights *
6/3 – Easton, PA – Stoltz Listening Room
6/4 – Wayne, PA – 118 North
6/5 – Putney, VT – Twilight On The Tavern Lawn
6/7 – New York, NY – Rockwood Music Hall
6/9 – Albany, NY – The Linda
6/10 – Exeter, NH – Word Barn
6/11 – Plymouth, MA – Spire Center for the Performing Arts
6/16 – Washington, DC – The Hamilton **
6/17 – Greensboro, NC – Flat Iron
6/18 – Asheville, NC – The Grey Eagle
9/1 – Ridgeway, CO – Sherbino Theater
9/4 – Pagosa Springs, CO – Four Corners Folk Festival
9/30 – Sisters, OR – Sisters Folk Festival
10/1 – Sisters, OR – Sisters Folk Festival
10/2 – Sisters, OR – Sisters Folk Festival
* w/ Bonnie Bishop
** w/ Pressing Strings
