Ben Labat Echolocationism — Ben Labat, the Louisiana musician who once fronted the alt-rock band the Terms, has released a new folk album titled Echolocationism. The record draws its name from the biological sonar that marine animals such as dolphins use to navigate, a concept that resonates with Labat’s own approach to songwriting and life. The album marks his seventh studio LP since 2006 and finds him stripping away studio artifice in favor of acoustic simplicity.
A Scientific Metaphor for a Musical Shift
Labat’s background as a physics teacher informs the album’s central metaphor. Echolocation—the process by which certain animals emit sounds and interpret the returning echoes to map their surroundings—serves as a parallel for finding a new direction when familiar landmarks disappear. That idea threads through the songs, which Labat wrote mostly on his own; he penned ten of the eleven tracks, with the sole exception being a cover of Harry Styles’ “Matilda,” a favorite of his daughter.
The title also reflects a deliberate turn away from technological complexity. Labat has said he appreciates the irony of embracing a natural navigation system while contemporary music increasingly leans on artificial intelligence and digital tools. For him, the appeal of Echolocationism lies in its back-to-basics ethos: just a voice and an acoustic guitar.
An Heirloom Guitar at the Center
That guitar is a Martin D-28 that once belonged to Labat’s grandfather. It had been sold at some point, but Labat bought it back, and the instrument became the foundation for the entire album. He recorded the project himself, building arrangements around the guitar’s tone and the songs that had never found a place in his full-band work. The result is a collection that feels intimate and unforced, with Labat’s gravelly Louisiana drawl carrying the narratives.
The opening track, “Set a New Course,” sets the tone with a stripped-down melody that recalls classic acoustic storytelling. Its lyric about life tuning the narrator “like a song” captures the album’s preoccupation with change and resilience. Labat has described the song as being about embracing new paths—whether in a career, a relationship, a move, or parenthood—and accepting that things will not always go as planned.
Lessons from a Major-Label Past
Labat’s current approach is informed by his earlier experiences in the music industry. The Terms released their debut album, Small Town Computer Crash, in 2006, produced by the late Grammy winner Greg Ladanyi. That record charted as a Billboard Heatseeker and led to television appearances, but an auto accident soon brought the band to a premature end. Labat briefly pursued a new deal in New York before returning to Louisiana to start a family and form Ben Labat & the Happy Devil, a regional group that has released four full-length records since 2010.
From Ladanyi, Labat learned the value of meticulous studio work: finalizing arrangements, rehearsing thoroughly, and listening to masters on every available playback system. He still applies those lessons today, often asking himself whether Ladanyi would approve of a given take. That attention to detail, combined with the raw immediacy of a single acoustic guitar, gives Echolocationism its distinctive character.
A Solo Path Forward
These days Labat performs solo, balancing music with a day job and coaching youth soccer. He values the closeness of solo shows, which mirror the directness of his songwriting. Like the dolphins that inspired the album’s title, he is relying on his instincts to navigate whatever comes next, trusting the echoes of his own experience to guide the way.
