For those waiting on anything new from Josh Garrels, perhaps a double album will make it worth your while. Garrels says his latest recording echoes not only his love of thick novels like a Dostoevsky classic but also the larger themes he’s exploring, found on the subject of Love & War & The Sea In Between.

In spite of the album costing more than anything he’s ever made (and holding more content than ever), the now-Portland resident is releasing his new album for free. It’s a move that he hopes will lead to new collaborations and a new audience, but it’s also a response to something he’s felt from the inside. If anything, Garrels’ latest — from the subject matter to the manner of release — serves as a perfect example of an artist following his muse.

SSv: The new album has enough for a double album. In a world where everyone’s recordings are going the way of the single or EP, and even the new Radiohead has 8 songs. Then here you are releasing this massive project.

Josh Garrels: Yeah, I think part of that is just preferences on my part. I like when artists have long albums. I’ve always appreciated it for some reason, and it’s the part of me that likes good books, too. I like reading a Crime and Punishment — this thick novel that really takes time to go through and digest and not only that, but you have to go back to it a few years later and read it again because there’s so much there. Some people won’t have the patience for that, but those who do like to engage a project in that way and take bite sized chunks and then put it all together and begin to understand the overall concept might find it exciting.

The other part of it is that this album really started to take on a thematic quality dealing with intertwining issues that almost make it feel like storytelling. There are no chapters or characters per se, but there’s a storyline nature of this album. In the end, to omit certain sections almost felt like editing out some content that I didn’t want to edit. But in the end, I wrote 30-something songs for this album, so I guess I did chop off a third for the album from what I had written. I just had a real prolific writing time and decided to follow through with a lot of them.

SSv: Yeah you don’t come out with 19 songs unless you have something to say. Can you tell us about the intertwining themes? I take it that’s the thought behind the title?

Josh: I had this urge to figure out where my life was at. You have to turn over what you’re focusing on to figure out the fodder for your material. There are a few things going on around us. There’s a lot of our friends getting divorced right now, and others are walking away from their faith in this season. That’s a real deal that we have to come to terms with.

Then we move into Portland and step out of a culture I grew up around in the Midwest. All of a sudden, even the faith and things that we believe or I believe, those things are suddenly much more real and you have to concertedly decide that you’re going embody this and own this. I can’t just float in this culture and take things for granted. That’s really something that we have to press into each day.

It was also just doing some writing along the coast, too. The Northwest coast is just so epic and beautiful, and I’ve never lived this close to a coast. It’s rocky and windy and burly. It’d be the West Coast version of Maine or something. It’s not tropical like southern California, so it’s a tough coast. So I did a lot of the writing on the coast.

So these things start intertwining, which in a broad sense are issues of love and issues of war and then there’s this sea. So I gave it this long title of Love & War & The Sea In Between dealing with each of those and how they play off of each other. It’s love between people, and I’ve never tackled issues of love. In the past, I’ve been scared to deal with the reality of love in a concerted way, because it’s such a cliche in the music world. But then you see the loss of love and tragedy within love relationships — that to me is what makes the contrast of that a very real thing and not this schlocky, hokey thing. When you see love working and you see love not working, I found myself dealing with that issue on this album.

I was also watching a lot of World War II documentaries while I was making this album. [Laughs] I was looking at the European resistance and the Holocaust and this worldwide fight. This war is even called the Righteous War or the Just War, because what was happening in Germany was pretty heinous or evil. You see that there are times to fight for what is good. For the sake of love, so often within a warfare setting, there’s loss and people die and it hurst. So a lot of tragedy in our lives, there’s a place for fighting for what you know is good and right. And I don’t mean guns and ammo right now, but having an inner courage that says, ‘I’m not backing down from this.’

With the song “Ulysses,” there can feel like there’s this chasm between where you’re at and where you hope to be — both in faith and in human relationship. There’s a distance between those places and then the hope to bridge that chasm. Wow, that’s a wide swath of everything, but that’s why it ended up being so long. I wanted to explore loss and betrayal, but then the hope of return.

SSv: When you’re wrestling with topics like that, you might need 19 full songs to just flesh out those topics.

Josh: Yeah, and there’s also five instrumentals, so as far as word content, we’re probably looking at 14 songs. It’s not quite as epic. But I love making little interludes, so I put those on there as well.

SSv: What are you experimenting with instrumentally? Any surprises?

Josh: This album more than any other has a lot of collaboration. There are 12 to 15 artists both locally and from across the country that as I’m making the songs and forming rough templates, I began seeking out friends or acquaintances and would send them through file sharing to record with them. The material would come in and I would decide what stays and what goes and edit it down to make it fit. So in a sense, there’s a lot more players on this album.

I think that’s more exciting, because I can only dream up so much on my own in a sense of how to really make a color a song in a specific way. My bag of tricks is only so large unless I have a lot of inspiration. It might not start to sound the same, but one person only has so much creativity. So I wanted to expand and collaborate and be excited about a direction that a certain person would go. It was great to watch a song go a new direction because of someone’s upright bass or drum track or guitar part. That took the songs in many new directions that I would not have dreamed up on my own.

There’s a group called Mason Jar Music in New York that I did a video recording with of “Words Remain” over the summer, and they did such a superb job with that video that I asked if they’d help with the album. They ended up doing three of the songs fully. I sent my guitar and vocal tracks and they built and orchestral section around the recording. Those songs that they worked on are pretty epic and beautiful, and I can’t wait to release those. They’re so outside of and beyond anything I’ve done so far.

It’s not only the new instruments, like a French Horn, but the lines they’re writing are more from a composer’s place — the types of runs and flourishes and embellishments are things I wouldn’t know how to draw up. So to boil that down, it’s just a lot of collaboration that’s made this so exciting and bigger than me.

SSv: When you let so many new people in, was it about exhausting everything you could do to this point? I mean, you’ve had several albums to explore your own muse. Or was it vulnerable even here?

Josh: I was fully ready for it. Part of my love of music is the exploration of new sounds. The quality of different instruments and the excitement of bringing players together is so much fun. That’s why sampling is so much fun. You take these snippets from other recordings that have a very specific sound quality and specific players, and then you’re infusing them into your work. So in a sense, this was a natural progression for me not wanting to use a sampler on a certain song but wanting an actual drummer. It was inviting real people into the process.

So yeah, it was really exciting for me. If I wouldn’t have been the final one making a decision on what stays or what goes, that would have been hard to relinquish that control of being the curator of all of the sounds coming in. But in the end, I feel like I am curating this, so I have the luxury of making the final decision of what works and what doesn’t.

SSv: Of the many collaborations, are there any surprises?

Josh: Well, that whole Mason Jar thing will be surprising for many to hear. Also, this dude Scott Franz from Eugene has worked with my buddy Josh Rosen plays the type of electric guitar that has this delay, reverb washed kind of guitar that you hear in Coldplay or Band or Horses or old U2 or something. He plays that style of guitar on here. Initially, I had him play on a couple of songs, but I liked his work so much that I just kept feeding him songs. So the electric guitar is new for me on albums. That’s a new sonic territory for me. Also, there’s just more live band stuff on here than on other albums.

SSv: So do you leave the sampling behind?

Josh: No, there is a concerted effort to make the synthetic or samples very obvious. So there are some really grainy synthesizers, and I haven’t done that in the past. The stuff I’m producing with software and sequencing, I’ve concertedly made it more obviously synth and drum machine. The stuff in that direction is more obvious in that direction. The stuff that’s not is more obvious in the other direction. It’s going harsher in both directions without getting rid of either.

SSv: I remember when you made the jump to do this full-time, and here you are doing that. Where do you hope this album takes you?

Josh: Well, let me backtrack a little. I feel an important part of this album that has dimensionally changed our approach to life was moving to Portland and moving into music full-time, we just had to wonder if it would work. It was a step of faith, I think. Then this investment in an album is the biggest I’ve ever done in terms of time and resources. So this was the first time I had ever invited a listening fan base to support me through funding or whatever means.

Hopefully, I wasn’t being annoying about it. It was just sending out a periodic newsletter saying, ‘Here’s where we are in the process. If you want to help out, feel free.’ Then it would have a little PayPal donation thing and our address. The response to that has been pretty awesome, so much so that this album has been funded by listeners. Like I said, this has cost more than anything I’ve ever done. Yet we’re coming down to the end and we’ve not gone in debt. Typically, I’ve gone 8 to 10 thousand in debt and more to come with manufacturing. So to be able to do this above the water is amazing.

So I can’t share too much right now, but it’s changed how we want to get music out there. We want to be generous with our work rather than demanding a ton of payment or something. So that’s changed how we’re even viewing bringing this to the audience. As far as hopes of what I’d like to see it do, I’m really excited about this. Whatever you’re working on, you’re hyper-focused on it and excited about it. So now it’s all I see is getting it out there. There’s always a hope that it connects with a broader audience than what you have. I’m more excited about opportunities that could arise from it than I am receiving a ton of acclaim or money or something.