visible to the naked eye, whether it’s that acoustic moment at the concert, or saying something funny in a song that is supposed to be serious and emotional. People do relate to it, and I find that super rewarding; that drives me in a lot of ways. I’m trying to understand what people really want to get out of music.”

The vessels for that communication are perhaps a slight change-up from what you’ve heard from him in the past, but at their core these songs are unmistakably Monks. “The Rules” is one of those direct songs that Monks says came so urgently and viscerally to him that he almost didn’t even need to write the words down to sing them: “I don’t make the rules/I just play along/And you can’t break the rules/I just sing my song.” It climbs by way of keyboards, drums, and even strings but, like all of the songs here, still maintains a sense of stripped-back, bare sparseness, allowing Monks’ voice to carry the weight. “Gasoline” is an answer to the challenges of time and weariness, and finds Monks both happy and relieved to see himself in love. “‘Gasoline is burning up/I need someone to rely on,’ that’s one of the most plain-English things I say on the record,” he says, pointing out its minimalistic strength amidst the acoustic strumming. “That can work without anything else on it.”

Despite all its sincerity and intimacy, A​ll Signs Points To Yes s​till manages to avoid being too wistful or overly serious while still giving us a very real look into the life of its singer. “Summer Dream,” which ends the record and was one of the first songs Monks wrote for the project, is filled with the kind of nice-guy humor that endeared us to him and his band in the first place, and may be the clearest glimpse of Monks’ personality we’ve seen yet. “​T​hat one I like because it’s got some humor to it, even if it’s pretty subtle,” he says. “It’s nice to get to be kinda funny. ‘We had nine children and named them Taylor.’ I think a lot of songs tend to be better as emotional outlets than humor outlets. It’s hard to capture that. I feel like my weekly crisis is: “Am I being me, am I being myself?’ I always try to be learning and expanding and pushing my boundaries, but at the end, am I being me? Sometimes it’s so hard to sound like yourself in a song, and then a song like “Summer Dream” comes up and reminds you, ‘Oh yeah! I’m that thing.’ That song was important for that.”

All Signs Point To Yes i​s a small record with a big heart, a snapshot of a man in a new time and new place who is learning to expand his reach, all while stripping away the superfluous and concentrating on connecting through trust, humor, and sincerity. “It gets a little mushy I guess,” he says, “but I met this girl, and all of a sudden you can see so far down the road, and things looked good! Let’s move ahead and not wonder about what else could be, let’s just do this. All signs point to yes, if you want them to point to yes. If you find yourself in the position to have that sort of attitude, like it’s destined or something, then all signs will point to yes.”