Chris Stills' brand-new record, Don't Be Afraid, plays like chronicle of a man who has forged his own identity out of a lifetime of unique experiences. Stills' family business is music, but that doesn't guarantee success or even acumen; stripes must be earned, and Stills doesn't take anything for granted. Chris Stills' parents are from two different continents with two distinct cultures, and he spent his formative years in both America and in France. After graduating from high school at the American School in Paris, Stills moved to Los Angeles and eventually to New York, playing in bands and honing his songwriting and performing chops. He garnered enough attention to get himself signed by Atlantic records and released his first album in 1998, after which he then hit the road - playing shows with The Jayhawks and Ryan Adams. Another album followed in 2005, and Stills found stage work in France - playing the role of Julius Caesar in a popular French musical, as well as landing a part in a 2010 French film. Between acting gigs, Stills kept himself busy by releasing an EP and recording yet another full album of his own music, but after a label shakeup he scrapped the entire project and returned to Los Angeles. Once again stateside after years of work in France, Stills released an EP in the U.S. in 2012 and found some TV work with a role in Season 4 of Showtime's Shameless. But it's his latest release, Don't Be Afraid, which distills Stills' experience into his most cohesive artistic statement to date. There are breezy, early 60s California pop songs, trancelike Laurel Canyon flower power meditations, stacked Woodstock-era vocal harmonies, a bit of Rufus Wainwright-style orchestral Broadway pop, Ryan Adams-influenced guitar rock, and an incisive indictment of the chaos of America's divisive new-millennium identity crisis that only someone with an outsider's perspective can capture with clarity. The record is anchored by Stills' versatile and assured tenor - it's the kind of voice that could turn heads at any karaoke bar in the world with ten seconds of a Jeff Buckley tune. Stills has the talent, the songs, and the voice, and Don't Be Afraid exhibits all of them in top form.