Nightcrawler, which premieres a dozen brand-new songs, is perhaps the most musically complex and fully realized album of Pete's career, a wealth of striking harmonic textures and sophisticated chord shifts framed in a lyric sensibility that's dark and hopeful and knowing and funny all at once. Jason Killingsworth, writing in Paste magazine, said that Nightcrawler is "More daring and challenging than anything Pete Yorn's done up to now."

"The record feels different and it sounds different, but it also feels like a continuation of what I've been doing," Pete offers. "I feel like it's taking more chances creatively as a whole and at the same time it's just music that I want to make. There are a lot of pop songs on it, but it might not be as pop-y as the last record."

On Nightcrawler, as on his previous albums, Pete Yorn plays a bulk of the musical parts: vocals, programming, acoustic and electric guitars, bass, drums, organ, and percussion. Collaborating with Pete on the album's production were Tony Berg -- "He brought a lot to the table" -- and Michael Beinhorn -- "We butted heads a lot, but we got some really interesting stuff out of it."

Some special guest artists stopped by to help out with Nightcrawler including the Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl, who plays drums on "For Us," the album's first single.

Martie Maguire (fiddle) and Natalie Maines (backing vocals), from the Dixie Chicks, appear with Pete on "The Man." (Pete, who first met the Dixie Chicks at an after-Grammy party in New York, cowrote a track, "Baby Hold On," on the Dixie Chicks' latest #1 album, Taking The Long Way.)

According to Pete, "every song has its own configuration. I want to finish complete songs as a whole before I move on to other songs." Some of Pete's new songs -- like "Broken Bottle," "The Man," "Ice Age," and "Same Thing" -- "feel like they're right in your face. Sonically, they're present." Others -- like "How Do You Go On" -- have what Pete calls "that wall-of-sound vibe, a bigger overall sound."

As a bonus for fans, Nightcrawler reprises Pete's "Undercover" (from 2002's "Spider-Man" soundtrack) and revisits Pete's sardonic interpretation of Warren Zevon's "Splendid Isolation," which also appeared on the 2004 tribute album Enjoy Every Sandwich: The Songs of Warren Zevon.

For "Vampyre," the album's opening track, Pete conjures a piece of music that builds from a quiet whisper to a storm. "It was important for me to start the record off with just my voice and guitar," he says. "I wanted it to be very bare bones like that. There were a lot of sleepless nights working on the sequencing, the detail of every song. The process was pretty painstaking for me because I'm just not nonchalant about it. It's something that I take very seriously and I want it to be right."

Pete Yorn's been working on Nightcrawler intently over the past three years. He listened to and absorbed a lot of music including Roy Orbison, Hank Snow, the Beach Boys, My Bloody Valentine, Talking Heads and Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding.

"I'm mainly inspired by melody," says Pete. "I have these sounds in my head, chord progressions that are interesting to me that are inspired by sounds in nature or other music that I've liked over the years. I try and have an open mind. Sometimes the way I hear things in my head isn't the way I actually want it to sound once it's recorded."

Nightcrawler was recorded in a series of sessions taking place "everywhere from Hoboken, New Jersey to Venice, California." A couple of songs were recorded in the backyard of Tony Berg's house.

Prior to the release of Nightcrawler, Pete Yorn embarked on his "You & Me" Acoustic Tour, which included sold-out performances at intimate venues as well as free afternoon mini-concerts day-of-show at local independent record stores at every city along his tour route. Each of Pete's in-store performances was recorded for a limited edition souvenir CD series, "Live From...," to be sold exclusively at the local independent record store originally hosting the mini-concert.

"I've been wanting to do an acoustic tour for a while," says Pete. "I wanted to connect with my fans on a small level and just get up close and see who the Pete Yorn fan is and let them see who I am."

During the making of Nightcrawler, Pete wrote and recorded the songs that found their way onto a special, limited edition six-song EP, "Westerns." "I've been in this lonesome cowboy phase for a while," Pete told Billboard.com. "I've been really inspired by guys like Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash. 'Westerns' has a twang to it and is a real departure for me, but Nightcrawler is most definitely the rock record."

With Nightcrawler, Pete Yorn says he rounds out the "morning, day and night trilogy of metaphors of progression of my life. It's an opportunity to re-set. This is where I am now and I'm anxious to get out and play it for people, and it's been really fun. It feels like another evolution in who I am as a person. People complain if you change too much or stay too much the same. Although I’m very connected to my roots and I’m very grounded, I’m not trying to be the guy I was artistically in 1996 or 2000, or 2003 even. I take it day by day.”