Shannen Moser introduced The Sun Still Seems To Move, their first album in four years, with a lovely ballad called “Paint By Number” that was among our favorite songs that week. Today Moser is back with another winner from the new album.

“Ben” trades out the prior single’s orchestral flourishes for a banjo; that plus the adolescent character sketch in the lyrics is giving me early Sufjan Stevens vibes. (Coincidentally, Strange Ranger’s Tyler Bussey worked on the track with Moser, and his recent Thank You Thank You single “Undiminished Life” gave me Sufjan vibes of a slightly different vintage.) The song is packed with vivid lines like “Well your daddy was a workin’ man, and so were you/ You worked so hard on the weekends that you fell asleep in school” and “Once I saw you shoot that gun in your backyard/ You were singin’ Johnny Cash, and I was 13 fallin’ hard.”

Here’s the backstory from Moser:

When I was in the 3rd grade I made a friend who I would ride the bus with to school for the next 8 years. We were neighbors in an extremely rural county – the kind of rural that was kids riding their family tractors to school and cow crossings holding up “highway” traffic. The streets around our houses didn’t get paved until I was in middle school. They didn’t even paint the yellow road dividing lines on until after I graduated and moved away.

I would spend a lot of time with this friend on the bus. We shared a headphone splitter to listen to music, we would put sticks in the middle of the road at our bus stop to try to slow the bus down and miss school, and one time he gave me five bucks to lick the bus floor- totally normal kid stuff I thought to myself. On our route to school there was a pothole in the road that, if executed just right by the bus driver, would send whoever sat in back two rows FLYING. Ben called it “Rocket Man.” He was the first person I ever used a swear word in front of. “Shit!” He said it back and it was like we had just robbed a bank and gotten away with it. Cursing in secret, at the time, was the most romantic thing my middle school brain could ever imagine.

I moved away in 2012 and didn’t see him again after we graduated. He stayed to work at his dads construction business and passed late in 2015. I wrote this song in 2016. It was originally voice and piano only. I brought it to Tyler Bussey (of Thank you Thank you) and we rearranged it a bit together. This song is my favorite on the record and I really love playing it for people live.

Listen below.

The Sun Still Seems To Move is out 9/30 on Lame-O.