When his grandfather dies and his mother forbids him from playing the Blues, Clayton Byrd runs away from home to join the Bluesmen.

Folds's masterful new collection isn't so much a statement as it is an offering, an open hand reaching out to all those wounded and bewildered by a world that seems to make less and less sense every day. The album marks Folds's first new studio release in eight years, and it's a bold, timely, cinematic work, one that examines the tragic and the absurd in equal measure as it reckons with hope and despair, gratitude and loss, identity and perspective....