It’s been a while since we’ve heard from adoptahighway. Since releasing his tremendous A Fault—along with some impressive visuals to accompany the album—in early 2015, experimental musician and composer Barry Paul Clark has kept busy playing bass in a wide range of projects, including Field Report, Tontine Ensemble, Lady Cannon, and Argopelter. While staying artistically active in those bands over the past five-plus years, Clark has also recently started to put a great deal of work into himself.
Last year, Clark sought the help of mental health professionals to address internal roadblocks, self-doubt, and other emotional hurdles he felt have been holding both him and his music back.
“I have, for years, been steadily building and continuing to develop mental obstacles for myself and engaging in very destructive cognitive behavior,” Clark says. “My relationship with what I do as a musician on a large scale, and how I express myself through what I create as adoptahighway, was negatively questioned and senselessly damaged.”
With extensive work and self-reflection through counseling, Clark says he started to repair some of the behaviors he felt were holding him back in general and getting in the way of his artistic endeavors. In early 2020, he started work on a long-awaited adoptahighway album. That album—Coaxing A Ghost Into The Room, which will be released this Friday—is a direct product of his work in therapy and aural evidence of his still-ongoing development. The album’s title is a reference to confronting personal demons, facing yourself, and learning to live with the ghost within.
Last month, Clark announced the forthcoming adoptahighway record (mixed by Daniel Holter at Wire & Vice and mastered by Justin Perkins at Mystery Room Mastering) by premiering the album’s opening track. Today, in advance of Coaxing A Ghost Into The Room‘s November 13 release, Clark is letting people hear two more adoptahighway songs as part of a music video he shot with Milwaukee-based movement artist Mauriah Donegan Kraker. Before Coaxing A Ghost Into The Room is released in digital and cassette formats tomorrow, you can listen to two more tracks and watch the video for “Enough is revealed in the way you wait” and album-ending song “and in the way you leap” below.