Guitarist Mike Lorenz announces his new album I’m Not There, arriving June 5, 2025 via Philadelphia-based label Each & Only (EO-013). Marking his return as a bandleader after several years focused on other projects, the record finds Lorenz in a more direct, acoustic, and songwriting-driven space, recorded with longtime collaborators bassist Sandy Eldred and drummer Matt Scarano.
After a period of personal and artistic transition, I’m Not There represents both a return and a reinvention. Lorenz had not released an album under his own name since 2018’s speak between, instead exploring the folk-adjacent direction of his band the Witherbees. The disruption of the pandemic, followed by significant life changes, created a long pause in his trajectory as a leader. By 2025, however, he had gathered a substantial body of new material and a renewed focus on the guitar as a primary expressive voice.
Across 2020 to 2024, Lorenz wrote more than forty compositions before narrowing them down to the ten tracks that make up the final album. The result is a set of pieces that trace an emotional arc shaped by shifting relationships, uncertainty, and personal reassessment. While deeply personal in origin, the music resists closed interpretation, instead opening into a broader sense of shared experience.
At the center of the album is a renewed emphasis on acoustic guitar, which reshapes both the trio’s dynamic and the overall sound world of the record. Moving away from the electronic textures and experimental devices of earlier projects, Lorenz embraces clarity, form, and melodic intention. The result is music that feels both composed and conversational, balancing structure with improvisational responsiveness.
The album’s lead single, “We Used to Talk All the Time,” introduces this aesthetic with understated intimacy, while pieces such as “Renovated Heart” serve as emotional anchors. Lorenz describes that composition as a turning point in the writing process, noting its immediacy and directness as the spark that shaped the direction of the record.
The full tracklist unfolds like a loose narrative:
Where Do You Go?
We Used to Talk All the Time
Never Seen
One Can Hope
I Don’t Have Time to Love You
Close the Book
Aimless
Not the Same
Renovated Heart
Beta
Recorded by John Anthony at Gradwell House in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, and mixed and edited by Anthony with mastering by G&J Audio, the album captures the trio’s long-standing musical chemistry in a focused studio setting.
That chemistry is central to the identity of I’m Not There. Eldred and Scarano—both longtime collaborators of Lorenz—bring a deep sense of trust and responsiveness to the performances, allowing the music to unfold with natural balance and precision. Their shared history gives the trio an intuitive language, one built on listening, restraint, and collective timing rather than display.
Stylistically, the album draws from a wide set of influences beyond jazz, including songwriting traditions associated with artists such as Jeff Tweedy, Elliott Smith, and Sam Amidon. These influences surface not as imitation, but as part of a broader aesthetic shift toward narrative-driven instrumental music—where melody and improvisation coexist in equal measure.
Tracks like “Never Seen” and “Aimless” explore tension and release through shifting harmonies and group interplay, while “Beta” and “We Used to Talk All the Time” highlight the expressive possibilities of acoustic guitar within a trio context, from meditative stillness to more energetic, folk-leaning momentum.
At its core, I’m Not There is shaped by absence as much as presence—by what has changed, what has been lost, and what remains. Lorenz frames the record as a document of transition, but also as a reaffirmation of musical connection: between three players who have worked together for nearly two decades, and between composition and improvisation as intertwined modes of storytelling.
The result is a record that feels grounded yet searching, structured yet open—an intimate trio statement that reflects both where Mike Lorenz has been and where his music is heading next.
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