Nichols, Caleb - Stone Age Is Now: Poems From Lithic

Stone Age Is Now: Poems from Lithic is the album by musician and poet, Caleb Nichols - both a companion piece to his book, Lithic: A Hyperballad (Harbor Editions 2026) and a follow-up to his album Stone Age Is Back (Royal Oakie 2025). Across twelve tracks, Nichols interpolates poems from Lithic: A Hyperballad with tracks from Stone Age Is Back, bringing new depth to his indie-rock and alt-folk compositions.

A meditation on grief, but not in the ways you’d expect, the album explores what it means to be living and dying right now, in this moment of extraordinary change.

Inspired by the raw immediacy of Neil Young, early REM, and Califone, Nichols adhered to a first-take best-take rule and tracked the album in just five days. Additionally, Nichols took some liberties adapting the poems from the book to the recordings. “You’ll notice that there are differences between the printed poems and the poems recorded here. That is because a poem is never finished and can exist in multiple instances at the same time, like in quantum mechanics. 

The cat in Schrodinger’s box is both alive and dead; at the bottom of the cliff, our eyes are both: closed and open” says Nichols.