“I am a mosaic of a shattered man, broken and becoming who I am.”

Ozzy Osbourne famously rhymed “masses” with “masses” on ‘War Pigs’, the opening track on Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Jon Foreman does him one better on ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’, the second track on his recent In Bloom, by slotting “go,” “go,” and “goes” into the A-positions of an AABA rhyme scheme. I forgive him. To date this is something like the eighteenth studio album he’s recorded between his main gig as Switchfoot’s creative force, half of Fiction Family, and his solo career, not to mention his two EP cycles that probably rank in the top half of his oeuvre. Plus, the more times I listen to it, the more it seems like it’s written about Drew Shirley, who amicably parted ways with Switchfoot a few years ago. It’s not the only place on the album that Foreman finds himself looking back. Opener ‘I Propose a Toast’ is an ode the “the stories that we’re made of,” and on ‘Eulogy’ he asks himself if he “still honestly believes that we were meant to live,” a reference to Switchfoot’s life-affirming hit from twenty years ago.

And yet for all its rearview mirror glances, In Bloom is defined by the ever-present, ongoing process of becoming who you are. The title track begins with the brilliant line, “Dylan on that speaker warning he not busy being born is dying,” and includes a prayer that the songwriter’s “failures will be fertilizer for the flowers on his tomb.” Similarly, ‘Antidote’, ‘Cheap Wine (and Expensive Conversation), and ‘As. Simple. As. Us.’ all seek to build an Ebenezer, to resist our inclination to limit our futures by dwelling on our pasts, to embrace our mortality and weaknesses, to cherish what we can in our present circumstances.

Throughout his career, Foreman has occasionally hopped on voguish trends, and he’s usually pretty good at whatever he puts his mind to. But his most fervent, resonant material comes when he sits down with a guitar or a piano and strives to reconcile his experience of the human condition with his biblically-informed worldview. This is proven by the album’s apotheosis, its most poignant track, ‘Heaven Is Yours’, a delicate, fingerpicked ballad, accented by gentle strings and keyboards, that riffs on the Beatitudes. “Blessed are peacemakers, the children of light. Blessed when you don’t fit in anymore ’cause you wanna do right.”

If Foreman doesn’t do anything on In Bloom that feels innovative or even particularly challenging for him as an artist, he succeeds by playing to his strengths, delivering another solid batch of thoughtful, elegant, and sweeping songs that are sufficiently sunny for easy listening but musically and lyrically layered enough to sustain long-term listening as well. Maybe it’s a little front-heavy, maybe you’re wondering when he’s going to sell the kids for food, maybe this is pretty dang good for a musician whose been plying his trade for thirty years.

Favorite Tracks: I Propose A Toast; Eulogy; In Bloom; Heaven is Yours.