50 miles west of Albany, in the muggy, August woods of Amish country, Howard arrived to play a show at a treehouse community’s annual music festival. The project of frontman and rhythm guitarist Howie Feibusch releases its sophomore album, Together Alone, this September, and it’s the first recording that Howard’s four members—Feibusch, Myles Heff (bass), Chris Holdridge (drums) and Alex Chakour (guitar, synths)—have all made together. Howard’s 2015 debut, Religion, was crafted more piecemeal, with samples, before the band came on the road to flush out those songs.,

Feibusch grew up practicing Modern Orthodox Judaism, but explains that the ingrained sense of community didn’t mean he felt as though he belonged.

“I’ve always favored the individual over the community, even as a Jew,” he says from the barn loft at The Root Community. “I’m not naturally a community member. I’ve always marched to my own drum.”

That individuality is everywhere on Together Alone, an album of gorgeously groovy synth and guitar that thrives on seeming paradoxes: simultaneously slow-simmering and immediate, soft-spoken and powerfully affecting, constructed around a narrative arc but never sounding too theatrical.

These are the signs of both a composer and a craftsman, and Feibusch has become the sort of singer-songwriter for the 21st century for whom a notepad and acoustic guitar are not the only tools of the trade. Like most working artists in NYC, he has a day job, composing and scoring the soundtracks to documentaries on A&E and The History Channel, and counts himself lucky that the gig dovetails so cleanly with his personal work. When applying the kitchen sink attitude of scoring for t.v. to his songwriting, everything is fair game.

“It’s been interesting working with editors, producers and a network on different sides,” says Feibusch. “I’ll get inspired by a sound on a synth or a guitar riff, just even a drumbeat or a texture, anything that moves me. You have the bass and then I’ll just hum something over that. What tempo am I feeling when I hear this sound, as opposed to starting with a drumbeat from nothing?”

This nonlinear approach to song craft has allowed him to perfect the songs on Together Alone—the swooning “Made Up My Mind” underwent 14 versions with the band before Feibusch landed on a version that he knew was the one, while the title track underwent 21 versions of lyrics.

Feibusch took his time with the record because he can, free to pursue perfection as an independent artist. “There is no label,” he admits. “We just call it Fashion People Records to make it sound more official.”

Those personal touches come through in the album’s narrative, too. Feibusch sings to an estranged sibling on “Oh, Dear Brother” over a Radiohead-gone-klezmer horn treatment, then makes the song’s theme of broken communication universal by ruminating on the power that fear has to take over our minds and prompt some to “drain the swamp and go burn down it all.”

“Sometimes when you have a song that starts personally, it feels good to just fully go there,” he says. “And with that one, when I fully went there it didn’t feel quite right. It didn’t feel in line with the music in a way. I wanted to widen it out and have it cross over to a larger group of people.”

The stunning opener, “Mother’s Wedding,” meanwhile, chronicles Feibusch’s feelings around his mom remarrying in a tune that sounds simultaneously personal and incredibly universal. Opening with a meditation on the impermanence of even sacred, special objects like wedding clothes, the lyrics address certain parts of the body that Orthodox women are supposed to cover.

“The elbows torn out—they’re supposed to cover their elbows,” says Feibusch. “But it wasn’t a sad song to me, it was kind of cheerful. I’m happy for her.”

Feibusch then explains that wasn’t until his mom remarried when he realized that, though she was his mom, she was also just a woman.

“Yeah, that was big,” he says. “My mom is just a woman looking to explore a new phase of life. We both let go of each other in this very beautiful way where I felt more freedom in my own love life, and she must have felt more freedom in hers.”

Though Together Alone was immaculately composed and borne of singular vision, community must be growing on Feibusch, who stretches the songs out live and takes them to looser, more improvisational places when he can sense that everyone in the audience is engaged and wants to be there. That may be why Howard’s set that night at The Root Community, delivered under a canopy of trees and lights and peppered with a campfire-ready cover of The Beatles’ “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” unfolded with such ease.

“There needs to be a certain level of ‘going for it’ when you’re playing live,” Feibusch reasons. “If everything’s structured and you know the script, it’s only fun ‘till you get it right.”