Fourteen years is a lifetime in indie years, but Todd Mack just turned the wait into a masterclass in patience and payoff. I’m Gonna Love You No Matter What, out October 10 via Rough Road Records, is the veteran singer-songwriter’s eighth album and his first since 2011’s The Thirteenth Step. Mack delivers 11 story-driven originals that feel like dispatches from the front lines of love, loss, and the stubborn beauty of showing up anyway.
The 14-year drought wasn’t laziness, it was devotion. A gap filled not with silence but with 10,000 lives bridged through his nonprofit Music in Common. Trying to connect people took precedence—bringing Israelis and Palestinians, Black and White Americans,as well as liberals and conservatives together through song. That mission bleeds into every track on this new album: love as the ultimate act of defiance.
Opener “Angel Above” hits like a gut-punch hymn—lush style Americana with weeping pedal steel and Mack’s sandpaper growl slicing through the ache of sudden grief. It’s the sound of a man who’s stared down hate (and lost a friend to it) choosing tenderness as rebellion. He eases us into his purpose.
The talent of a singer and songwriter is right up front in “On A Line.” Guitar strums and a steady beat lay the backdrop but the thought provoking lyrics shared are the real meat here. Todd Mack has a knack for making the listener consider things from alternate points of view. “Undone” is another one that hits very similarly.
The pace picks up with the raw energy of “The Light Within.” Picked guitar and a grooving bassline drive home the point. “River Carry Me,” a Hurricane Katrina 20th-anniversary gut-check, is roots-country so raw you can almost see the floodwater rising in. The big chorus invites you to either join in or lay back and let it wash over you.
We get a hard changeup with “Reckless.” A song that detonates with a crunchy electric chug and some dueling guitar solos. It screams 70s arena rock sound without the bloat. The jangly, pep filled closer “You Are There” flips the script as a radiant tribute to journalist Daniel Pearl that finds joy in the echo: “You are there, you are there.” Vocal harmonies add an almost joyful feel to the memory of an honorable man taken in a most horrible way.
If you seek a purpose, turn on I’m Gonna Love You No Matter What by Todd Mack on a coastal drive at the golden hour, windows down, salt in your teeth, and toast the songwriter who never stopped believing music can stitch the world back together, one stubborn chord at a time.
Keep up with Todd Mack on his WEBSITE.
