Andrew Combs’s fine songwriting will never cease to enchant us. With *Ideal Man*, the young Texan delivers a new folk gem. On his new album, *Ideal Man*, Andrew Combs worked with producer and engineer Sam Cohen (Kevin Morby, Benjamin Booker) to achieve a rawer, more direct sound. The tracks were captured live in Cohen's Brooklyn studio, with compact arrangements fueled by tight, elastic grooves. Although Combs is best known as a singer-songwriter in the classic 1970s Laurel Canyon sense, he demonstrates the true versatility of his work here, often setting aside acoustics in favor of atmospheric synthesizers and distorted electric guitars. Andrew Combs collaborated with some of his favorite writers on this album, including Dylan LeBlanc, Jeff Trott, Joe Henry, and Kenny Childers, but the stories he tells here are deeply personal and remarkably vulnerable. A sense of danger and violence underpins the entire album, much like the entire country, but here it only serves to make the moments of beauty and connection much more poignant. Life is short and time is running out. Andrew Combs has no intention of wasting a second.