Philippines-raised/America-based singer-songwriter Lee Baggett returns with Everybody’s Asking, his fifth full-length in as many years. Its eleven original songs feel like they drifted in on the tide, carried by warbled cassette hiss, glowing moonlight, and half-remembered stories. Recorded with only the basics—acoustic guitar, bass, drums, vocals—in a shack above the bay, the album leans into its own fragility.

Baggett’s distinctive voice moves through the record like a memory slowly unraveling, threading folk, psychedelic edges, and lo-fi intimacy into meditations on absence, longing, and the ways people search for meaning when something—or someone—goes missing. The lyrics balance hazy imagination with a yearning for what’s real and grounded, returning again and again to questions of identity, love, and the quiet consequences of choices, mistakes, and missed connections.

The music here has a mellow and vintage sunset-country sway that is unhurried, curious, and quietly devastating, as if it’s reaching “back to the future, stealing a moment of time” (from standout track Frankenstein), while still vibrating in the present. Gentle grooves in the space between dreaming and being, you might just need it these days.

Everybody’s Asking—produced by Bob Thayer, Cory Gray, and Fruit Dogs—is out now digitally and on vinyl LP through Perpetual Doom. Featuring Lee Baggett (guitar, vocals), Nick Aives (bass), Zeb Zaitz (drums), and Anya Roma (backup vocals), with Bob Thayer (vocals) on Little Buckets.

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