Alex Ebert returned to his roots for his sophomore solo album “I vs I.”

The album, released Jan. 31 via Community Music and AWAL, explores the “many facets of the human experience, through the lens of a deteriorating relationship and the eventual phoenix-like rise back into the warmth of a new love.”

The album release comes nine years after his first solo album, “Alexander” and addresses such issues as love and sex, jealousy, battling depression, the passage of time and the chase for eternal youth.

In our Q&A with Ebert, the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros frontman discusses the human emotions and inspirations behind the new album, the writing process and how he needed to “return to himself” along the way.

Q: You have described “I vs I” as being somewhat of a “concept album” that describes the past three years of your life. What have you learned about yourself over the past three years?

Ebert: I feel like in so many ways, a part of my learning process over the last three years was coming back into myself or sort of a reversion to previous states – particularly when I was truly just like in a state of total, almost libertine existence between the ages of 18 and 22, when I was just formulating sort of the concepts for Ima Robot and when I felt like an artistic explorer, when I painted every day and just stayed up in this apartment and just made stuff and really had no cares in the world except art and exploration. It was a sort of self-obliviating time and I think I needed a return to myself in that way – a return to just art for art’s sake, a return to not thinking about this as a business, a return to not caring about who my audience might be. Just sort of me in a cocoon state, sort of a chrysalis.

It’s hard to tell what I might’ve learned from that. From time to time, I’ve had these moments, especially right before Edward Sharpe, where I had to think back to the first time that I really discovered music and what music was about initially. And to do that I had to think back to my elementary school classes  – classes that Christian (Letts) and I were in – when we were about 5, 6, 7, 8 years old.

I guess in a lot of ways, what I can say about what I’ve learned is that over the last 12 years, I really sort of forced my emotions to a place that played second fiddle to a grander scheme of communal emotionalism to communal aspirations to aspirations of community and togetherness and societal good and thinking more on a grand scale, and addressing those issues in my lyrics … and sort of keeping my own personal emotions about daily, more worldly, potentially more trite feelings of interpersonal relationship stuff, keeping depression and all of that in the back seat. And when I ended up returning to some of the music I made when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I realized that I was so courageously outspoken about my emotions and what I was going through. I needed to sort of return to that. It was time to sort of return to sort of an emotion of the self and just allow myself to talk about things that were just really basic emotional things I was going through and not sort of hide them beneath a gauze of societal goods.

Q: The album dives into some very personal topics, such as love, family, the highs and lows of relationships. How hard was it to open up about the human emotions of a relationship, especially compared to some of your more political/protest or religious songs?

Ebert: “I Don’t Wanna Pray” was one of the toughest songs I’ve ever written – one of the most daring songs I felt like I ever put out … But this, because I’ve became sort of philosophical and above the fray in my own mind, above the emotional fray, returning to a place where I was able to communicate vulnerabilities … it was almost a foreign experience because it had been so long. So it was a little like re-learning how to ride a bike or something.

Q: Does “I vs I” focus on any specific relationship in particular?

Ebert: For the most part, it was about grappling with the dream of the family, and things not working out in a way that I had initially envisioned it. A lot of it was sort of rotating around that. That had taken up a lot of my emotional capacity the last three years. Then finding new love and all that as well toward the end of the album. The album really has almost an entirely linear storytelling aspect to it, where it starts off sort of cavalier about romance and I might be in love today, but that doesn’t mean anything, and then suddenly the relationship breaks up and I’m devastated. Then on through the sort of the emotional fray and then getting into that love space again and losing it again.

And then always, as with all my shit, death is in there somewhere – with my kid asking me, ‘Why are you always talking about life and death?’  … So now having this other person to sort of communicate that with and be real with … just sort of chronicling the time.

Q: Describe the writing process of the album?

Ebert: It was really solitary. I was doing it the way I used to do it when I was a kid, which is starting with beats and freestyling. I would create some beats and then I just started freestyling and then a melody would come out, and then I’d start building from there. So I was recording and writing at the same time, which is how I used to do it – sort of like the tropes of truth. Not only just the solitary sort of process, but also the tug of war within myself – the negative and positives, the dark and light and all of that.

Q: I love all the poetry that you have shared on Tuners. It’s such a different side of you than we’ve seen. Any chance we’ll see an Alex Ebert poetry book anytime soon?

Ebert: I hope so. Yeah. I want to start putting stuff together. I’ve been messing around with transcription of that stuff. So yeah, we’ll see.

Q: You also have been sharing many of your old journal entries on Tuners. How do you think you’ve evolved both musically and personally, and what would you tell your old self?

Ebert: So much of of me hasn’t changed. It’s interesting. As I sort of look back, I think the main thing that wished I had kept sort of firmer grasp on is just my sense of instinct about keeping things rigorous, vigorously close to my instinct of my vision for my art – from everything to regretting not forcing the band (ESMZ) into keeping the bus that I bought on Craigslist to allowing us to play normal venues and do the normal touring thing when what I really wanted to do was establish just a house party/parking lot/park – total break-up of the institutionalized apparatus of capitalist music-making. I really wanted to have a full blown DIY, totally different approach – a movement-making approach – to music.

With Ima Robot, I allowed us to be produced by people that I didn’t think should produce us. I allowed our sound to change in such a way that I didn’t actually believe in for the sake of the argument of the A&Rs telling us that that’s the way it should be done. I had to stop Ima Robot because of allowing those decisions to occur and eventually feeling entirely artistically depleted. And then I had to put Edward Sharpe on hiatus for similar reasons. Those moments are cool because they force a new generation out of you. But I don’t necessarily think they need to occur. I think that I could have been nimbler and more exacting with my principles.

Is there anything new that you are working on that you’d like to share?

Ebert: There’s an app that we’ll be doing beta testing called Bootlegs. It allows users and fans to submit all of the unofficial content they have for any particular artist to that artist’s feed. And then the artists themselves can upload all official and unofficial content they have so that everything can be in one place. Amazingly, somehow that just doesn’t exist. Basically it will allow people to copy and paste YouTube links or if you have an MP3 for Ima Robot or Edward Sharpe – anything and everything that you might have. So yeah, that’ll be beta testing soon. I’ll be putting up a whole bunch of stuff that nobody has. It should be cool.

Ebert – backed by ESMZ bandmates Mark Noseworthy, Crash Richard and Orpheo McCord – will perform tonight on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Part 1 of Ebert’s double album is available here.

“I vs I’ Track Listing

To The Days
Jealous Guy
Automatic Youth
Miles Away
Hands Up
I Smoke
Miracle
Stronger
Gold
King Killer
Fluid
Alex Meets The Night
Her Love
Press Play