JUDAH & THE LION To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what happens when you’re busy making other albums. After recording2022’sRevival,singer-songwriter Judah Akers decided to creatively face the fact that his own life had imploded.Over their decade as Nashville’s crossover folk heroes Judah & the Lion, Akers and mandolinist Brian Macdonald had built astrong enough foundation to explore both darkness and light. Not long after college, the hardcore fans of the Lumineers andMumford &Sons made their 2014 debut,Kids These Days,then broke through with the genre-blendingFolk Hop‘n’Rollin 2016.With2019’sPep Talks,they revealed the musical confidence to grapple with real life struggles, setting Akers’candid dispatcheson alcoholism and family trauma to their cohering mix of acoustic roots and Alt Rock. But throughout the creation of2022’sRevival,after the departure of longtime banjo player Nate Zuercher, Akers kept a tight lid on some grinding personal agony thatwas keeping him frozen, creatively and in life.The band had madeRevivalduring the pandemic,with the intention of bringing more positivity to the world. But during itscreation,“I was fighting for my marriage, going crazy, and getting sick,”says Akers, 33.“Ifought writing about what I was goingthrough. Finally, a friend told me,‘If you don't write about the biggest heartbreak of your life, you can’t be honest in your work.’And he was right.”Since Akers and Macdonald are both sons of therapists, ideas likeElisabethKübler-Ross’s five stages of griefwere relatively close to hand, and once Akers committed to the harder material, the concept emerged as an almost inevitablealbum conceit.“It gave us a way to embody the tough and sometimes really negative emotions that I deal with in songs, butwithin a larger framework of empathy, forgiveness, and hope.”Like Kübler-Ross’s model, the album begins with“Denial,”a hushed invocation over wordless choral voices, the singer musingon being inside an unruly psychic process:“Just when I thought that I had accepted it/I’d just sink into another depression.”Thesong is like“opening the door to a house,”Akers explains.“Where you want to indicate all the rooms a visitor will find inside,the range of experiencesthey’ll have.”The music enacts a subtle morphing within the track, as Macdonald described playingthe mixing board like an instrument, faders moving on recorded tracks—dubbing autotuned vocals, raw ones, acousticinstruments, synth washes—bringing different emotional textures to the foreground.“We wanted it to feel as if all the emotionsfrom the record were spinning around you,”Macdonald says