Each American Aquarium album is best viewed as a slice of BJ Barham’s life. The frontman writes in the moment, and his music is a distillation of the world as he sees it, and the life he has carved for himself along with his wife, Rachael, and their 8-year-old-daughter, Pearl, in the increasingly-suburbanized Wendell, North Carolina, a half hour east of Raleigh. In the two years since the last Aquarium record, as he wrote and recorded what became New Ways to Lose, Barham has been thriving.

If Bueller were still around, that would be the takeaway from the 10-track, Shooter Jennings-produced record, which drops on Friday.

Aquarium’s 12th studio album showcases the band at the top of its game and Barham at the top of his craft as a songwriter. More than a decade into sobriety, and nearly that long into parenthood, Barham has a content life in his midcentury-era home a few blocks from downtown Wendell, and on the road, where he has cracked whatever code independent artists must crack to sustain a career. The rock-edged New Ways to Lose would reflect all that — and maybe even cause longtime Aquarium fans to reconsider their “BJ Barham made me cry” t-shirts — were it not for Bueller.

“I wasn’t ready for losing my first pet,” Barham says. He’s at his dining room table in Wendell, in early June. There’s a stack of records a few feet away. Those are pre-orders of New Ways to Lose, which Barham will pack and ship himself to fans who pre-ordered. We had just returned from lunch at Bellow Butcher, his favorite place to eat in a town full of his favorite things. He had shown me a slice of Wendell’s history, which he sought to preserve in the face of encroaching development in 2025 when he ran unsuccessfully for town council.

All this shaped New Ways to Lose, as did the death of Barham’s mother on New Year’s Eve 2019 and the death of his grandmother shortly before. None of it hangs over the record more so than Bueller, the French bulldog Rachael brought into their relationship and marriage. Bueller died in January 2024. Bueller was the first pet that BJ had as an adult. “Favorite Hello,” the seventh track on the album, is Barham’s tear-stained tribute to his late best friend.

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“My favorite part was coming home from tour,” Barham says. “And when the key hit the door, before Rachael or Pearl even knew I was home, you could just hear the feet trying to get traction on the hardwoods. He would come sprinting toward the front. I remember coming home, the first time after he passed away, to just a quiet house — when the key hits the door and there’s nothing. That was when it hit me, and it happened to be a time when Pearl and Rachael were, like, running errands. It was me in an empty house and a silent house, and that’s where I sat down and started writing most of that song.”

Barham has never been accused of holding back, but even by his own standards, “Favorite Hello” is intensely sad, opening with a lighthearted recap of the joy brought to him before the chorus of, “You were the goodest boy a man could ever ask for/My favorite hello was my hardest goodbye,” lays bare Barham’s grief. As fans have gotten early listens to the song — during encores, via Barham’s Patreon, or at a preview party in February at Barham’s annual Roadtrip to Raleigh festival — the overwhelming response has been tear-filled. “When that first chorus gets done, people are just ruined,” Barham notes. After he wrote the song and played it for Rachael, it ruined her, too.

“Very rarely does she listen to a song I wrote and have an emotional response to it,” he says. “Often she listens and gives me very constructive — sometimes cruel — notes. I remember playing that song for her and she just broke. My wife is a very strong person, emotionally. Her constitution is very high. Watching her break down, I realized, ‘Oh. This is gonna fuck people up.’”

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Barham took the song to Sunset Sound Studio 3 in November, where it made its impact on Jennings, himself a dog lover. It also blew away Barham’s bandmates in American Aquarium.

“I think it’s important to give the listener a hint of hope or happiness in the arrangement,” guitarist Shane Boeker says. “‘Favorite Hello’ could have easily been a slow, dark number. But by putting it in a key that sits on the higher end of BJ’s voice, letting the rhythm section drive it, and adding some fun tones and a melodic hook, it juxtaposes the subject matter just enough to not be heavy-handed.”

In that respect, the song is also a microcosm of New Ways to Lose. When Barham’s friend Colin Nash, a songwriter from rural Missouri, texted him after seeing a closed sign on a discount store, the two turned it into “Dollar General,” the album’s first track about life in a no-stoplight town hit by hard times. Its lead single, “Twin Flames,” is Barham’s rock-heavy, horn-backed ode to Rachael, with lines like, “I found you this go-around/I’ll find you in the next one, too.”

The album’s title comes from “Can’t into Could” and the advice of Barham’s father that “can’t never could.” Its opening line of, “You’ll never hear me make an excuse, just over here inventing new ways to lose,” is a reference to Gary Hahn, the former radio announcer for the football and basketball teams at Barham’s alma mater, North Carolina State, and his manner of relaying tough defeats to fans listening over the airwaves.

“They would blow, like, 30-point leads with five minutes left,” Barham says, “and he would come on the radio sounding so positive: ‘Well, NC State created a new way to lose, today!’”

Aquarium is made up of Barham and Boeker, plus drummer Ryan van Fleet, bassist Alden Hedges, steel player Neil Jones, and keyboardist Hank Long. With the exception of Long, who joined the band last July, it’s the same outfit that played on Aquarium’s last studio album, 2024’s The Fear of Standing Still. For a band that has had 32 members since its founding in 2006, Long replacing Rhett Huffman on keys has been the only lineup change since 2020, breeding a familiarity that becomes evident in the studio as they turn Barham’s raw lyrics into album cuts.

“We listen to him acoustic, and try to filter the feelings we get from hearing it for the first time through our own interests,” Hedges says. “It’s very playful, chasing that moment of, ‘Oh that would be cool!’ It isn’t always cool, but the freedom to chase it is important. Once the melody and lyrics are written, it’s fair game to reimagine it, sometimes it takes stripping the chords off and having BJ sing the melody over a whole new part to get something we all agree on.”

Of equal importance to New Ways to Lose is Jennings, who has completely upended Barham’s recording approach. Until Jennings produced Aquarium’s 2020 record Lamentations, Barham believed the way to avoid complacency in the studio was to change producers for each record. Even as producers like Jason Isbell (2012’s Burn. Flicker. Die.) and Wes Sharon (2018’s Things Change) dot the Aquarium discography, they did not repeat behind the console. And indeed, after Lamentations, Barham turned to a new producer — Brad Cook — for 2022’s Chicamacomico.

But he returned to Jennings for Fear of Standing Still. Now, with two more records under his belt with the Grammy winner, Barham says the revolving door of Aquarium producers is out of commission.

“I’m not writing off that Shooter’s our guy forever, but in the foreseeable future, I don’t see a reason to make a record with anybody else,” he says. “He gets what we’re doing. He knows how we operate. And, obviously, the content speaks for itself. We’ve made three records with him, and they are three high points in our career.” 

Settling on Jennings is just another routine Barham has fallen into. Since he swore off alcohol in 2014, the 42-year-old has gradually added structure to his life in and out of music. Rachael and Pearl — and Bueller — all helped, but the steadiest hand in Barham’s world has been his own, by necessity. In 2017, all of the then-members of Aquarium quit. Barham responded with soul-searching and a decision to root out the toxicity, which had driven so many players away from the group. Today, Barham operates his music and band like a machine. Everyone gets paid on time. Their tour schedule is modest, affording a work-life balance across the board.

Perhaps most importantly, Barham owns Losing Side Records, the label home for the entire Aquarium discography. Those stacks of records in his living room number in the thousands ahead of a release. Barham himself, with his wife and daughter’s assistance, packs and ships each direct order, often driving hundreds of albums at a time to the post office in Wendell. At one point, as Barham runs down New Ways to Lose on that dining room table, we’re interrupted by a call from one of the town’s postmasters offering to set up a pickup at Barham’s house, so that he doesn’t flood the mailroom with albums. “They can’t be out in the sun. They’re vinyl records,” Barham responds.

Wendell itself is part of that same structure for Barham. When we grab sandwiches at Bellow Butcher for lunch, he starts riffing with the shop owner, practically begging him to bring back a particular sandwich Barham has been missing. Later, he riffs with the manager at Parallax Coffee Lab — one of his favorite coffee shops — as he orders what is obviously a Barham go-to. The town is home to him, beyond just a place where he pays taxes. So, a year ago, when he realized there was nobody on the town’s council who would listen to his appeal to slow the encroaching sprawl of Greater Raleigh into Wendell, Barham ran for the board himself. His campaign centered around a word-of-mouth tour of the town and leveraging Aquarium’s social media following and his status as a mid-major celebrity in town. Barham ultimately lost the election. There were three council seats, and he came in fourth place. He regrets nothing.

“It really made me get to know a lot more people in this town,” he says. “My dad taught me early on in life, you can’t bitch about something if you’re not willing to change it. Running for political office wasn’t on my bingo card last year. I had zero aspirations of being a politician. But when I realized that nobody else was gonna run for it, I can’t sit around and complain about the state of things if I’m not willing to throw my name in the hat and change things. The fact that some first-time politician, rock-and-roller finished fourth and lost by a hundred votes says a lot about how many people were pissed off.”

Barham also ruled out running again in four years. His window, he says, was 2025, and the people have spoken. “We’re gonna be a suburb of Raleigh very soon,” he laments. But he’s also not going anywhere. He and Rachael moved from Raleigh to Wendell before they had Pearl, and it’s the only home she has known.

Pearl’s upbringing manifests itself on New Ways to Lose in its penultimate track, “Just Like You.” It’s a song Barham wrote for his late mother and grandmother, through the light of Pearl. The recurring line in the chorus is, “In the right light, she looks just like you,” and the song centers around Pearl’s curiosity about both women. If much of the material on Chicamacomico found Barham in the throes of grief over the passing of his mother, “Just Like You” finds him on the other side of grief.

“All Pearl has ever known of her is this Paul Bunyan lore,” Barham says. “My mother was this larger-than-life figure to her that, like, fought off 800 men at a time and won wars. She has these, like, tall tales of my mom. It’s fun to see her have this really heroic vision of my mother and my grandmother.”

Barham and Aquarium will officially celebrate the release of New Ways to Lose with a Grand Ole Opry appearance on Friday night. They have 16 more dates on the books in August and September, including a Ryman headlining show on Aug. 14 and a slot on the Boys From Oklahoma lineup at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Aug. 22, ahead of Cody Jinks, Flatland Cavalry, Cross Canadian Ragweed, and the Turnpike Troubadours. They’ll keep that pace up through the end of the year, with shows scheduled from coast-to-coast and a European run set for November.

Fans with one of those “BJ Barham made me cry” shirts likely anticipate this, but everyone else in attendance should be warned: Aquarium is almost certainly going to play “Favorite Hello,” and with good reason, according to Barham.

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“The reason I tackle a lot of those tough songs,” he says, “is to try to get people through it.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.