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Seth Walker’s new album, I Hope I Know is a beacon of light, each of its ten songs shining forth with what so many have come to love about Walker and his soulful Americana: diverse influences, contemplative lyrics, that signature blue tone on the guitar, and movement both geographic and spiritual. It’s his 11th recording to date and continues a long-running collaboration with producer Jano Rix. Perhaps best described as Walker’s ’round-midnight album, I Hope I Know was written in the midst of a breakup as he relocated from his home in Nashville, TN to Asheville, NC, and endured the inherent struggles caused by the pandemic. Its tempos are slower and tonality darker than on previous work. In Walker’s words, he had to just “sit with it.” The music’s creation embodied trying and failing without forcing anything: not time, not the songwriting or its grooves, not a sense of control, not even his own healing. He credits the practice of “search and surrender,” a quest for new meaning in things he may never fully understand. Taken in its totality, it’s a beautiful reckoning with heartbreak, moving across states and coming to terms with the uncertainty of the future. “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,” explains Walker. “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.”