After two albums [(2011) The Ones I Love / (2015) One Thing That's For Sure], hundreds of shows and nearly a decade of living and performing in New Orleans, Colin Lake and his wife decided to buy a sailboat, sell their house and pursue a completely different dream than the one they had been fortunate enough to share up to that point. Throughout the chaotic year that preceded his departure, Lake had quietly been slipping in and out of a non-descript recording studio in Uptown New Orleans, laying tracks for an album that he wasn't sure would ever see release. At the controls was Grammy-winning producer Eric Heigle, who decided they should take a completely different approach than they had taken for their previous project together. This time, they would build most of the songs one track at a time, usually beginning with a vocal and guitar track, followed by Heigle's drum tracks and so on. By the time Lake shoved off, they had nearly completed an eight-song set that represented a high-water mark for the artist, both in terms of song craft and execution.In the years before casting off, Lake had been grappling with some of the most salient themes of our volatile times. He wrote the song "Cross Over the River" in a motel in Hattiesburg, MS, sometime during 2015's renewed controversy surrounding the confederate flag. Another tune called "Last Days of the Dark Age" proved a powerful meditation on the pain of a society crippled by fear and violence. A few times that year, Lake put on his headphones and listened with new ears to rough mixes of these songs and others that sat in a state of suspension - unfinished, unreleased and unheard.Some tunes, like "Stars" and the hypnotic, Van-inspired "Siren's Song" had foreshadowed his time at sea, while others like the rollicking "Extraordinary Times" had only grown more prescient in the two years that they laid dormant. Affirmed that the work he was revisiting was his very best to date, the time felt right to release the material to the world.The album's title track would be "Forces of Nature" - a high- energy, blue-eyed soul number draped in shimmering electric guitar and melodic piano riffs and ladened with earthly metaphors for the cosmic connection shared by Lake and his wife for so many years.

As described in our Privacy Policy, we collect personal information from your interactions with us and our website, including through cookies and similar technologies. We may also share this personal information with third parties, including advertising partners. We do this in order to show you ads on other websites that are more relevant to your interests and for other reasons outlined in our privacy policy.

Sharing of personal information for targeted advertising based on your interaction on different websites may be considered "sales", "sharing", or "targeted advertising" under certain U.S. state privacy laws. Depending on where you live, you may have the right to opt out of these activities. If you would like to exercise this opt-out right, please follow the instructions below.

If you visit our website with the Global Privacy Control opt-out preference signal enabled, depending on where you are, we will treat this as a request to opt-out of activity that may be considered a “sale” or “sharing” of personal information or other uses that may be considered targeted advertising for the device and browser you used to visit our website.