Marnie Stern has announced her new long-awaited album The Comeback Kid is due for release on November 3 via Joyful Noise Recordings.

The 12-track LP picks up where she left off with her last album, which was 2013’s The Chronicles of Marnia.  “I expected that all those years of playing other kinds of stuff would have influenced me—and it didn’t at all! I was fully back where I was before,” Stern says.

She then discusses writing the latest album, saying “It was so great to be able to start being myself again and when I would think, ‘Oh, is that too,too weird?’ I’d remember I’m allowed to do whatever I want! This is mine. It’s me.”  She continues “I’m trying to go against the grain of this bullshit that when you get older, you lose your sense of taste. I want to empower people to not be so homogenous and go against the grain a little bit.”

The singer-songwriter adds “Taking joy in your individuality is the message of The Comeback Kid, as is the realization that making music which truly reflects who you are in all your brightness and your weirdness is quite possibly the key to happiness. “This record is about reassuring yourself that happiness is not about what kind of things you have or how many things you have or what you don’t have—it’s about all the good things you do.”

In celebration of the new album, Stern has released the album’s lead single “Plain Speak.” “‘Plain Speak’ keeps a positive attitude in the face of frustration. Keeping that hope alive is really the most difficult thing for me to do in life, so I try to do it as much as possible in my music. This song is a perfect example of that. Some of the lyrics are backwards, to keep the theme of feeling like you are moving backwards in a situation and no one else seems to give a shit but you!” she says.  Check it out below.

Earlier this month, Stern performed for the first time in 9 years at The Knitting Factory in New York.

The Comeback Kid Tracklisting:
1. Plain Speak
2. Believing Is Seeing
3. The Natural
4. Oh Are They
5. Forward
6. Working Memory
7. Il Girotondo Della Note (Ennio Morricone cover)
8. Til It’s Over
9. Nested
10. Earth Eater
11. Get It Good
12. One And The Same

Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat