I had a great group of people helping with this record:

The Fourteens

  • Roger Brainard – electric and lead guitars

  • Geoff Gill – drums

  • Mary Gill – background vocals

  • Mark Sobus – bass

  • Mark Van Allen – pedal steel

  • Steve – vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin

With additional help from

  • Lee Davis – piano, organ

  • Nina Gill – background vocals

  • Ben Davis – tenor and bari sax

  • Brandon Austin – trumpet

  • Rich Herring – lead and additional guitars

Words and music by Steve Baskin – I Don’t Know Nothing (Love Song), Beside You, Better, Lucy and I Sometimes Think. Words and music by Steve Baskin | Trey Hollingsworth – How I Feel, Where You Are. Words and music by Steve Baskin | Mary Dean Benasso – Trip Begin. Words and music by Steve Baskin | Tracy Carmen Brown – Bad Idea. Words and music for A Hard Day’s Night by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Horn arrangement for Better by Alex Rodiek. Horn arrangement for I Sometimes Think by Steve Baskin.

Produced by Steve Baskin and Rich Herring. Mixed and mastered by Rich Herring at Trax Productions, Nashville, TN. Recorded by Lee Davis at Lee Davis Studio in Maysville, GA with additional tracks recorded by Steve Baskin at Underground Studio in Atlanta, GA and by Roger Brainard.

Photography by Kevin Garrett and album design by Giuli Hull.

I Sometimes Think (Better)

2026   |   Vinyl, CD, Digital

My sixth record is an awful lot like my first. I Sometimes Think (Better) is a reimagining of my 2006 debut, recorded this time with The Fourteens. I didn't have a band like The Fourteens when I was making the first record, I played every track myself, and I was very literally learning how to make a record. Having them onboard gave me the tools to record the songs the way I'd originally envisioned them."

That band – Roger Brainard on electric and lead guitars, Mark Sobus on bass, Geoff Gill on drums and percussion, Mary Gill on vocals, and Mark Van Allen on pedal steel – is the whole story. The arrangements don't just improve the songs; they change their posture. They stand up straighter. As Darryl Sterdan wrote in Tinnitist, it's "the sound of a veteran artist rediscovering his own spark through the camaraderie of a band that feels like family."

Sterdan framed the record beautifully: "If Love Is Hard chronicled the endurance of love, I Sometimes Think (Better) celebrates the endurance of art – the idea that good songs can keep growing, just like the people who write them." Musically it moves across power-pop, indie-rock, country, folk-rock, blues, southern soul, Americana, and heartland rock — what Mike Greenblatt at The Aquarian called "a freewheeling brand of what one might call Instant Classic Rock, heavy on the singer-songwriter smarts."

Declan Culliton at Lonesome Highway singled out "Trip Begin" as a highlight, "loaded with screeching guitars and a Tom Petty-type rhythm section," and noted that the mandolin-led "I Don't Know Nothing (Love Song)" — complete with dreamy pedal steel — is "a mature and heartfelt love song." The closing tracks "Bad Idea" and "I Sometimes Think" are, in his words, "full-on rockers." John Apice at Americana Highways heard something simpler and just as true: "Bad Idea and I Sometimes Think both sound like Steve Baskin being Steve Baskin and no one else. This is his launching pad."

The set includes a soulfully reimagined "A Hard Day's Night" — not a random flex but, as Sterdan put it, proof that these songs "would have no problem holding their own on a playlist with everyone from Jesse Malin and Nathaniel Rateliff to Tom Petty, the Allman Brothers and The Beatles."