So Much for Goodbyes unfolds much like a set at a Billy Strings concert unfolds, save for the fact the songs are all original and all deal in one way or another with the 2025 death of Strings’ mother, Debra Apostol. 

There’s everything from the straight bluegrass of “I’m One of Those” and “Bluewater Breakdown” to the experimental, effects-laden new(er)grass of “Burn the Other End” and “Lucid Daydream.” Strings’ road band, mandolinist Jarrod Walker, bassist Royal Masat, banjoist Billy Failing and fiddler Alex Hargreaves for the core group on Goodbyes, but drums inform songs like the Michigan-centric “Live to Tell,” pedal steel shows up on the guitar-as-a-cure-for-depression lament of “I Wish I Wanted To” and Del McCoury and Lindsay Lou add their distinctive voices to “Lay Me Down” and “Mill Town Flood,” respectively. 

This is a heavy record that, like Strings on stage, shifts styles and moods across 16 tracks, not one of them extraneous, and 75 minutes of music. But there is joy, as Strings remembers he is a music-lover first  on “I Like Train Songs” and leans into spirituality when he asks his mom to “Light the Way” and asks the same of his maker on “Wrestling an Angel.” 

“Precious creator, maker of time/please don’t you let me waste all of mine,” he sings. 

Despite the depth of the lyrics, it’s “Deb’s Waltz,” the tender instrumental that closes the album, that’s perhaps most affecting. After all that preceded it, the “Waltz” encapsulates Strings’ grief and underscores all he sang before. 

So while the songs all stand on their own, So Much for Goodbyes is an album best consumed in order and in its entirety. It’s also Strings’ most-mature, most-true-to-his-onstage-self studio recording to date.