Benjamin Dakota Rogers Announces New Album 'Paint Horse'

Ontario-based folk artist Benjamin Dakota Rogers has announced his anticipated new studio full-length, Paint Horse, set to arrive on February 17, 2023.

Rogers' unvarnished sound began receiving attention on TikTok earlier this year where acoustic videos of songs from the upcoming album, "John Came Home" and "Blackjack County Chain," have amassed well over 12 million views.

With today's announcement, he is sharing a new single from the 13-track set, "Arlo," which is available to stream on all platforms. It tells the story of a man with little left to his name, inspired by the areas of the country where there have been many "family farms lost to progress."

Of the single, Rogers offers, "I remember camping in the woods with my dad. The night sky at my folks' farm during my childhood was true darkness flecked with stars. I remember feeling like I was in the middle of nowhere even though we were only 20 minutes from the nearest town. In the twenty something years that have passed since then, those towns feel much closer. It was this past summer I realized that even at 2 in the morning I could see the nearest subdivisions lighting up the clouds bringing their glow ever closer. It makes me feel sad, it makes me think of old times - of family farms lost to progress and what the future will look like."

In his videos, Rogers wields a wildly distinct voice and a 1922 Stella tenor guitar tuned like a fiddle that he bought from Fred Eaglesmith at age 14. He creates songs out of short stories he's written and records them in a barn on his family's farm in Southwestern Ontario where he grew up building greenhouses and living off the land. "Growing up my family drove a big VW bus. We listened to a lot of fiddle music, going from festival to festival," he says. "These days I live in one of the barns, tap trees, and make music."

Rogers inherited his great-grandfather's violin at a young age and soon learned to match his instruments to the guttural twang of his voice. With sturdy backing by a sparse rhythm section, he offers a fresh and authentic contribution to the traditions of string-band sound. His studied nod to old-time and bluegrass rhythms effectively smashes the barrier between past and present, young and old, traditional and unconventional.

Listen to the new single here: