The Comeback Kid serves as the follow-up to 2013’s The Chronicles of Marnia.

“”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,” Stern says of the brand new track. “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!”

Over the past decade, Stern has been lulled by the gentle rhythm of a nine-to-five job as the guitarist in The 8G Band on The Late Show with Seth Meyers; she’s also been raising two kids. But when it came time to start working on a new record, the ease with which she picked up right where she left off was surprising even to her. “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.

“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,” says Stern of writing songs for The Comeback Kid. “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.”

She continues: “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.”

Tracklist:

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