Last summer, I went to see Caleb Stine and his band the Brakemen play a show at Star Bright Farm in White Hall.  It had rained earlier that day and the sky was still overcast, so the late afternoon concert was moved from the lavender gardens into the barn.  It was during his second set that Stine called out to the audience asking if there were any requests.  And what happened next tells you everything you need to know about what kind of person Stine is.

A little girl, maybe five or six years old, cautiously approached the stage.  When Stine spotted her, he stopped his patter midsentence, gently got down on one knee beside her, and cupped his hand to his ear to hear her whisper.  He then turned to his band, and after getting their wholehearted buy in, looked back to the girl and said, “Yeah, I think we can play that one.”

What followed was a joyous, rollicking, impromptu Row Row Row Your Boat that had the entire audience singing (in rounds, no less!)  By the end of the song, the sun was poking through the clouds and there were smiles all around, though none brighter than the one on the face of a certain little girl.

It then hit me.  Maybe that girl, with Stine as her accomplice, was onto something.  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, maybe life really is but a dream.  I got another IPA and pondered this imponderable while Stine and his band jammed on an extended cover of the 1958 Bobby Freeman classic “Do You Wanna Dance?”  And for that instant, all was right with the world.

It’s these kinds of magical, everyday moments that Stine celebrates on his latest album, Outlaw in Your Mind.

Stine is a performer, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, and Baltimore man-for-all-seasons.  I don’t think he set out to become the cornerstone of the local roots music scene but that’s what he’s done since arriving in town from Colorado twenty years ago.  At this point, it’s hard to say where Baltimore ends and Stine begins and vice versa as the man and his adopted hometown have become inexorably bound.  If I were mayor, I’d name him Songwriter Laureate of Baltimore and take away his key to the city so he can never leave.  He’s a treasure.

Outlaw in Your Mind is either Stine’s fourteenth or twenty-first album depending on how you count them.  (He recorded a bunch of albums in his teens with a four-track recorder he got with money he saved from his afterschool job at McDonald’s.)  Either way, Stine is a prolific, some might even say compulsive, songwriter.

“My intention is to release an album every year,” he said.  “There’s been some lag, but I’m trying to hit a stride of one per year for as long as I can.”  It’s not just about quantity either.  Stine said, “I try to make each album the best one I’ve made.”  Asked if he thinks he’s succeeded with Outlaw in Your Mind, he replied, “I do.”  And I have to agree with him.  Outlaw in Your Mind is outstanding from top to bottom.  To paraphrase a line from Gone, the song that kicks off the album, we just might be witnessing Caleb Stine in his prime.  Lucky us.

It all begins and ends with the songs.  The playing, singing and production on Outlaw in Your Mind are all first-rate, but that wouldn’t matter much if the songs themselves, all penned by Stine, weren’t so strong.  They represent a compelling mix of moods, tempos, and genres, too, running the gamut from a toe tapping fiddle tune (Saturday to Friday) to a poignant voice and acoustic guitar number (One Human Lifetime) to a quirky electric boogie (Golden Chipmunk) and ending with an epic walk in the woods backed by a string section (Human Beings).

This mixture and pacing are completely intentional.  Make no mistake, Outlaw in Your Mind was crafted to be an album in the traditional sense and listened to in that manner.  “A lot of industry people would argue that it’s all about the singles and who cares about the album,” Stine said.  “But I love the album as an art form.  There are so many albums in my life that have gotten me through the darkest hours.”  Stine wants Outlaw in Your Mind to be pressed on viny someday, further cementing its status as an album and not just a bunch of songs.

When asked if there’s a theme that runs through Outlaw in Your Mind’s ten songs, Stine demurred, saying that’s for the listeners to decide, but then added, “I would say that probably a theme in my life and on this album is holding space for real human connection and interaction and dignity.”  There might be no better illustration of this on the album than Gone, which Stine describes as “kind of a buddy love song.”  With wry humor and an earworm refrain, Gone takes listeners along for the ride on a daytrip from the mundane to the sublime.

“The song is based on trips I’ve taken with friends up to the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, which is the most remote wilderness you can get to in the lower 48,” Stine said.  It’s perfect just the way it is, but I can totally imagine some Nashville cat (Jason Aldean, perhaps?) taking a cover version of Gone to the top of the country charts by squeezing out all the charm and nuance Stine has imbued in the original and recasting it as a party paean to a favorite rural pastime.  And for Stine’s sake, I hope that happens, not that it would matter much to him.

Though its themes may be elusive, there are some definite, unmistakable vibes that permeate Outlaw in Your Mind.  The album has a freshness to it, a sense of intimacy and authenticity that’s striking.  Stine said, “This is as close as you can get to actually having someone sitting in your living room or in the passenger seat of your car singing to you.”

And again, this isn’t by chance.  A lot goes into making music sound so effortless.  First, none of the songs on Outlaw in Your Mind have been sitting on Stine’s shelf too long, which is one of the big advantages of putting out a new album every year or so.  As for the recording process, Stine said, “We kept it moving.  We didn’t spend too much time on any one thing.  It’s easy to get snagged on something, then it gets brittle.  The most important thing is the emotion, the thrust of truth.”

There’s a relaxed confidence and sly humor that pervade Outlaw in Your Mind.  Stine is a serious artist, but he’s confident enough not to take himself or his music too seriously.  He’s someone who works on his craft every day, like it’s a spiritual practice.  And it doesn’t matter to him if his music resonates with ten other people or ten thousand or ten million, just as long as it stays true, which just might be the real theme of the album.

I couldn’t help but notice a certain Bob Dylan vibe (and I mean that in the best possible way) to Outlaw in Your Mind, and I asked Stine if he remembers the first time he heard Dylan.  “Probably when I was two years old,” he said.  “Specifically, when I was young, Slow Train Coming was played often in my home.”  He cites the closing song on the album, When He Returns, and its lyric, “Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through,” as being particularly inspiring.

“I can’t tell you how much strength that line alone has given me in life,” Stine said.  “And the cool thing about lyrics is that they’ll stick in your mind and come back to you when you need them.”  Outlaw in Your Mind, too, has plenty of “stick in your mind lyrics” that will give you pause the first time you hear them and come back to you someday down the road when they’re needed.

On the (almost) title track, Outlaw, Stine sings:

You can be an outlaw in the outskirts of your mind.
You can be a poet in the parking lots of time.
You can be a rebel in the ruins left behind.
You can be an outlaw in your mind.

They can take your time.
They can take your job.
They can take your town.
They can even take your dog.

But they can’t take the truth
You spent a whole lifetime to find.
You can be an outlaw in your mind.

When I asked Stine if he thinks most people see themselves as outlaws, he nodded emphatically.  “In the short time this has been released I’m realizing that everyone identifies with the song because everyone feels like they are the only one experiencing this,” Stine said. “Isn’t that a beautiful thought to realize that we all are feeling odd and awkward?”

Another album highlight is One Human Lifetime.  It’s elegant in its simplicity, with just an acoustic guitar and Stine’s plaintive vocals.  But it packs a wallop in its 2:30 run time.

It’s better to sit and to feel and let life reveal
That’s it’s you who turns your own winding wheel.

“I feel like those two songs [Outlaw and One Human Lifetime] are probably the best songs I’ve ever written,” Stine said.  Of One Human Lifetime in particular, he said, “That’s about as good a song as I can write.  If someone said to me, you have five minutes to justify your existence on this planet, I would offer them that song and say this is what I got.”

Two of the album’s songs, Human Beings and The World Turned Upside Down, first appeared on Human Being Things, a four song EP by Stine and his long-time collaborator Nicholas Sjostrum, with Andrew Bohman.  Stine said, “Andrew Bohman is an incredible recording engineer who was graduating from the master’s program in production at Peabody.  Their final project was to produce songs by professional musicians.  He approached Nick and me and we agreed to work with him.”

I don’t know what grade Bohman got on the project (anything below an A+ would be a travesty) but the results are astounding.  Bohman’s string arrangement for Human Beings (which features four violins, a viola, and a cello) is particularly impressive.  The strings are tasteful, not at all obtrusive, and work surprisingly well with Stine’s matter-of-fact vocal delivery on the song.  It’s an unexpected touch and closes out the album with a flourish.

Stine is backed on Outlaw in Your Mind by a great group of Baltimore-based musicians including Jim Hannah and E.J. Shaull-Thompson on drums, Gino Hannah on bass, David McKindley-Ward and Linda Nelson on vocals, Burke Sampson on guitar (with a gorgeous solo on Outlaw), and Nicholas Sjostrom, the album’s producer, on just about anything and everything, including some elegant piano on What They Call the Real Word.

Time will tell if Outlaw in Your Mind proves to be a classic in the American Beauty, Blonde on Blonde or Music from Big Pink sense but it’s certainly built with that in mind.  “The reason I try so hard,” Stine said of his albums, “is that I’m building them to last.  Ten years from now or twenty years from now, I think they’re going to hold up because it’s not about a particular flavor-of-the-month, it’s about human experience.”

Don’t worry too much about Stine becoming an insufferable lout when Outlaw in Your Mind blows up and he goes from Charm City troubadour to a judge on American Idol.  It’s not likely to happen (I mean the lout part.)

“I’ve been able to work on my craft my whole life and not get sidetracked,” Stine said. “I love what I do. I love my life. I love my community. I love the people around me. There is no razzle dazzle that you can offer me. Life is always life.  And life boils down to who you are inside of your own heart and who you are with the hearts of others in your life.”

And finally, maybe that’s the real theme of the album.

Outlaw in Your Mind is available on Bandcamp and major streaming services.  Check out more about Caleb Stine at his website: CalebStine.com.