At first glance, it seems ironic for Andrew Stern to release a record named Lonely Hunter. After all, he’s spent the past two-plus decades steadily broadening his sonic palette among an abundance of Boston collaborators: Americana/folk mainstay Mark Erelli, musical polymath Brian Carpenter, contemporary pianist/improviser Gill Aharon, roots-rock stalwart Dennis Brennan, and punk legend Lenny Lashley, to name a few. With connections in every corner of the music community, thinking of Stern as solitary feels downright inaccurate. But when it came to writing and recording Lonely Hunter, Stern walked his creative path alone.

After 25 years of lending his virtuosity to other groups, including his own projects AS3, Crystal Lizard, Ugly Beauty, Magnet-O!, Telescope, and The TrueVines, Stern will self-release his seventh solo record on October 6th, 2023.

The 10-track album strums a heartfelt narrative that captures Stern’s extensive experience as a guitarist. His mastery of rubato seems to stretch and compress time, flexing his savant status while simultaneously recalling his tutelage at the New England Conservatory’s Contemporary Improvisation Department, which Stern attended in the 1990s as a transplant from central Illinois. Innovative textures and tones spring from his 1936 Gibson L-00 and 1959 Guild T100D, his sole musical companions on Lonely Hunter. That is, unless you count the rhythms of greats like Neil Young, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Hank Williams, whose timeless musicianship appears via covers woven into the fabric of the record. Opening originals “Mount Hope” and “Black Iris” — an acoustic reworking of his AS3 tune — establish Stern’s sense of musical freedom, which courses through his sprawling rendition of “Cold, Cold Heart” and continues through Lonely Hunter’s pensive final notes.

Mystery snakes between Stern’s genre-fluid chords, but so does yearning, speaking to the timeline of the record. Lonely Hunter wandered in Stern’s imagination for years before he successfully recorded the album in early 2023, due to a bout of tendinitis that thwarted his initial recording session.

“I thought I could push through but I had to abandon mid-session because I experienced so much pain in my arms and hands,” Stern reflects. “It could've been a blessing in disguise because the way I wanted to play the material required a musical maturity that perhaps I didn't fully possess at that time. I stayed with the tunes in the ensuing years, developing a style along the way.”

With a renewed sense of health in his sights this past February, Stern recommenced work on Lonely Hunter. After four years of waiting, he laid down the album in a mere four hours at Dimension Sound in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

“Playing solo is where I can best push beyond notes, to exist in a purely evocative musical realm,” Stern explains. “Lonely Hunter captures this on record… finally.”