Late style: You can only get there if you’ve been around long enough to have had an early and a middle one. Maturity, wisdom, refinement are its hallmarks. And having done things a certain way for a time, you might want to do them differently in order to arrive someplace new, someplace surprising. With Late Style, Wesley Stace, the artist formerly known as John Wesley Harding, but before that as Wesley Stace, has done things differently. Having begun to put some new lyrics to music, in his usual way, singing to an acoustic guitar, he realized he was coming up with old solutions, reinventing a wheel he had already made, with chord progressions and melodies that worked as folk and pop songs but were not satisfying his desire for something fresh, something he’d be excited to listen to in 2021. The album is due out on Omnivore Recordings on September 17, 2021. “The idea was the same as always: to find a new way to crack the egg of ‘gentleman-songwriter with lots of lyrics’,” says Stace, “most particularly in a way that suited my voice (which has never quite provided the cut glass that rock requires) but that more accurately reflected what I actually listen to for pleasure on the kitchen stereo when I’m cooking, where you’re very unlikely (with no offense to those great songwriters) to hear Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell etc.” And so he turned to David Nagler, the musical director of his portable variety show, the Cabinet of Wonders, to be the Rodgers to his Hart, the Elton to his Bernie, the Bachrach to his David.