Proceed by Jon Camp

Centripetal Force Records is proud to announce the forthcoming release of Proceed, the new full-length album from guitarist and composer Jon Camp, arriving October 17th, 2025. The album marks Camp’s second release on Centripetal Force and follows 2022’s critically-praised solo-leaning collection. With this release, Camp shifts fully into electric full-band territory, presenting his most dynamic and collaborative work to date.

Anchored in rich storytelling and expansive guitar arrangements, Proceed is a powerful statement on forward motion in the face of life’s joys and challenges. Inspired in part by nightly conversations with his parents, the album weaves together themes of family history, ecological and political concerns, and quiet perseverance, all delivered with Camp’s signature emphasis on melody and compositional depth.

“Thematically, it’s about moving forward and persevering amidst heaviness—absorbing the past, living in the present, and confronting an uncertain future,” says Camp. “The title Proceed reflects both a personal survival instinct and the broader cultural need to keep going, even when it’s hard to see what’s ahead.”

While Camp is best known in fingerstyle circles for his guitar playing and his deep compositional focus, Proceed represents an evolution. It’s electric, expansive, and emotionally muscular, leaning heavily on the expressive capabilities of his Telecaster’s B-bender and his Creston guitar’s vibrato bar. The album recalls the spaciousness of Camp’s 2019 album Headwinds & Tailwinds, but with more zip and edge—less rooted in country twang and more committed to forward propulsion.

From the ruminations of “Kerosene Goodbye” (a nod to his father’s childhood on an Iowa farm moving from kerosene light to electricity) to the existential pondering of “From the Big Bang to the Battle of Oriskany,” Camp channels memory, imagination, and political reflection into powerful instrumental narratives.

Although Camp writes all the material himself, Proceed is, by his own admission, his most collaborative album yet. It features a cast of longtime musical companions, including Dave Jones, Scott Verrastro, Ryan Peterson, Nick Arrivo, Kaitlin Grady, Jamie Linder, and Matthew Byars, along with special guests such as David Sexton and Simone Baron, and fellow Centripetal Force artists Drew Gardner and Joseph Allred. Produced and mixed by engineer Kevin Bernsten, who’s now worked with Camp on five releases, the album benefits from the comfort and communication that only years of shared musical history can offer.

“These songs grew from years of live performance and mutual trust,” Camp explains. “This is a document of a band that shares a common language and knows how to listen to each other.”

The album’s recording was made possible in part by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, a testament to the artistic depth and regional significance of Camp’s work. The grant allowed for additional instrumentation and studio time, helping realize the album’s vision with clarity and force.

While Camp is sometimes categorized under “ambient country,” Proceed resists easy genre definitions. It’s rooted in folk, not in form, but in ethos: a music crafted late at night after the day job ends and often influenced by his immediate surroundings.

“I think of myself as a folk musician in the sense that my music is just baked into my life,” Camp says. “I work on it every day—it’s how I process the world.”

Jon Camp is a fingerstyle guitarist and composer from the Washington, DC region. He blends twang, drone, and melody into a cohesive whole that is exploratory without forsaking the hook.

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