Jason Singer thought his 2025 full-length debut as Michigander would change everything about his life and work. During the prior decade, after all, Singer had cobbled together the start of a successful career as an incisive and infectious songwriter from the stuff the music industry considers scraps—a half-dozen singles and a quartet of EPs, collectively suggesting he was one of indie rock’s sharpest new tunesmiths. Surely, then, his self-titled start—recorded over the course of a year, with real support from a bona fide team of advisers and collaborators—would boost him several levels, getting him a little closer to his teenaged premonition that he’d be headlining arenas within five years of finishing high school. But as you may already know, that didn’t happen. Michigander felt only like the upper lip of the plateau Singer had been climbing for a decade already. So what, he wondered, was he supposed to do now? The answer that came back was obvious: Keep writing.

Over Before You Know It is the magnetic and relatable result of that work and the broad but detailed view from the top of that plateau. Across 10 songs written and recorded quickly with a crew of close friends at home in Nashville (including producers and pals Jeremy Lutito, Collin Pastore, and Jake Finch), Singer mixes self-criticism with music industry sendups, sad-eyed contemplations with unguarded love songs. He offers up the things that almost stopped him and those that now keep him going with a rare admixture of candor and catchiness. This, turns out, is the level up. Like Loudon Wainwright III fronting some boundless pop-rock band from the heyday of Barsuk Records, Singer makes these deeply probing songs feel expert and effortless, as if he took a big enough step back from his own life to see the whole thing clearly, then said, “Fuck it, man, let’s turn that into a song.”

The story of Michigander’s second album, to be released by Thirty Tigers, begins well before the release of the first one. In 2024, Singer was scheduled to run the South by Southwest gauntlet, set for nine shows in only three days. He was deep into work on his debut, but his life felt upside down. Just as the post-pandemic world began opening up, in 2022, Singer broke his leg in the California mountains. A month later, his wife, Britney, was walking to work in Nashville when a truck blew through a stop sign and ran her over, nearly killing her. And then, as she recovered, doctors discovered that his mother had a brain tumor. By the time he got to Austin, in March 2024, he thought life was finally mellowing. Nevertheless, he had a panic attack during a business meeting in a ramen shop, got rushed to a hospital, and absolutely thought he was going to die. He even hurriedly wrote a goodbye letter on his phone, just in case he was gone for good.

That sensation is at the core of “Freaking Out,” the dissociative anthem that is, in turn, at the core of Over Before You Know It. Singer tells us clearly about all that’s going wrong, from the weed that seems to be cleaving him from reality to his world that seems forever wobbling. “I don’t know about you,” he deadpans, “but I haven’t been happy in a while.” In the chorus, though, Singer lands on a line that pushes these three minutes well beyond complaints: “This is what it feels like to be alive,” he sings, the sound of a smile stretched across his lips. The first song Singer wrote for Over Before You Know It is, fittingly, the start of his reckoning.

After a few years of consistent talk therapy and EMDR, Singer now feels better than he ever has as an adult. But Over Before You Know It is sort of the last gasp of all these misgivings, as he realizes which people and perceptions he can dismiss, as he accepts which social patterns he truly cannot change.

Released 7/31/26 through Totally Normal Records, Michigander’s Over Before You Know It is available here on limited edition ‘Sunny Lawn Splatter’ colored vinyl LP and CD.

*Preorders for store pickup will be held for three months after release date. Please pick up your Over Before You Know It preorder no later than October 31st, 2026.