After four years milling over the concept and fifteen months recording alone in the tool shed behind his mother’s house in Jacksonville Florida, Ben Cooper, AKA Radical Face, is finally ready to release his sophomore album ‘The Family Tree: The Roots’ out October 4th on Bear Machine. It’s the follow-up to his 2007 debut indie triumph Ghost, and the first installment of what will eventually be three stand alone records all tied to the theme of a Family Tree—once again separating himself from all things traditional.

Hauntingly beautiful, The Family Tree: The Roots has all the makings of an indie classic. Don’t be fooled by Ben’s understated voice and the simple beginnings. Each song builds in layers much like the depth of its characters. From soaring tracks like “A Pound of Flesh” and “Severus and Stone,” eerily dark pieces like “Black Eyes” and “Kin” to warm enlightening gems like “Always Gold” and “Mountains,” the songs flow together with mindful artistic clarity, allowing you to fully escape into the album as the stories unravel.

Based on a fictitious, sometimes otherworldly family in the 1800’s, Ben limited the songwriting to instruments that would have been accessible in that era—piano, acoustic guitar, a floor tom, and voices—only bringing in additional instruments during tracking when needed. “I like storytelling, and wanted that to be the focus. I looked up genealogy charts and studied some American history for a frame of reference, then pulled from personal experiences and put it all together.” Such concepts and stories come naturally to Ben, whom before turning to music wrote fiction. He switched to music after a hard drive crash where he lost his two nearly completed novels. Three albums dissecting a family and its descendants from the 19th and 20th centuries might seem outlandish to most, but for an artist whose history involves giving away compete records exclusively in exchange for mailing him “anything but money,” we can expect no less.