Andrew Combs

Dream Pictures, the sixth album from songwriter Andrew Combs, is a dreamy, dusky record for the quiet hours that bring each day to a close.

It was during those nightly stretches of solitude, after his children had gone to bed, that Combs penned the record's 12 songs. "That's the best time for me to do anything creative," says the Nashville resident, who's become a fixture of modern-day American roots music over the past decade. "Six nights a week, I'll come out to the garage to write or paint, and it's a time for me to escape into my little world for awhile. A chance to take a big breath, in and out."

Hailed by everyone from NPR (who hosted Combs for an acclaimed Tiny Desk performance in 2023) to Rolling Stone (who deemed him "a pop perfectionist"), Combs has built his career with a chameleonic sound that explores subtlety, nuance, and the grey area between folk, country, and classic pop. The exploration continues with Dream Pictures, an album that finds its creator embracing atmospheric textures and heady, homegrown experimentation. The album opens with "Fly In My Wine" — an instrumental sound collage laced with upright piano, buzzing pedal steel, and field-recorded audio from a visit to Richard Serra's installation at the Bilbao Guggenheim — and closes with the title track, where Combs' voice leaps into a gorgeous falsetto during every chorus. Between those two bookends is a record that's astral one moment and delicately earthbound the next, grounded in genuine song craft and a willingness to get weird.

Combs co-produced Dream Pictures with drummer Dom Billett. The two musicians began touring together in 2017, and their friendship is almost audible throughout the record. "Dom bought a tape machine and wanted to learn how to use it, so he asked if I had any new songs," Combs remembers. "That's how everything began. I'd go over to Dom's house, where he has a room filled with vintage keyboards and guitar pedals and drums, and we'd add cool weirdness to these songs. I didn't have a grand thesis behind the album I was writing; I was just happy to be making something I was proud of, with one of my best friends."

With the exception of instrumentalist Spencer Cullum, who contributed pedal steel to 10 songs, Dream Pictures was entirely recorded and performed by Combs and Billett. The two embraced all the imperfections that came with the homemade tracking process, finding the beauty in the blemishes, balancing the rawness of reel-to-reel recording with the smart finesse of Combs' songwriting. They even captured Combs' vocals with a series of live-in-the-studio performances, resisting the temptation to edit different takes together for a more polished — but admittedly less believable — product. "I love art that has just enough naivety to it, because it feels real," says Combs. "We were figuring things out as we went along. We were creating our own world."

That world springs to vivid life with tracks like "Mary Gold," whose bouncing keyboards and psychedelic flourishes nod to Combs' longtime appreciation from 1970s pop songwriters. "Eventide" is a mellow, unhurried love song, its sparse verses giving way to a lush, layered outro. "Table For Blue" finds him in storyteller mode, imagining the lovesick longing of a lonely restaurant employee as he sits alone, eying a woman across the room while an unhurried groove pulses beneath him. "The Sea in Me" returns Combs to his musical bedrock — a slow, emotionally-charged sound fit for rainy days and reflection — while the experimental "To Love" shoots him high into the cosmos, finding room for analog synths, spacey electric guitars, and layers of atmospheric noise.

"This record is about contentment: being at ease with who I am and where I am at in my life and career," Combs explains. "It’s me sitting back at the end of each day and finding something that is inspiring, and embellishing on it. I don’t think many of these songs could’ve come if I was in turmoil. I think that dovetails with the album title, because being at ease with who I am lets my imagination run wild and gives me the ability to dream."

Like a canvas splashed with watercolors, Dream Pictures is a woozy, soft-hued portrait of an artist at work, delivering well-crafted songs while embracing the new hues that occur whenever his sonic textures run together. It's music for the wee small hours, shot through with diffused daylight. A decade after his first appearance at Newport Folk Festival, Combs continues to create timeless art for modern times, blurring the dividing lines between genre and generation. Dreamy, indeed.