Is there life after death? Fortunately when it comes to hard drives and the creative blood, sweat and tears they contain, the answer is sometimes “yes.”

Richmond-based singer and keyboardist Ben White has backed nationally touring Americana artist Cris Jacobs, and he’s played countless Richmond gigs with the Trongone Band, John Bradberry and Mekong Xpress. With the latter, which had a weekly pre-pandemic gig at the Answer Brewpub, he’s brought his own songs to life, from rollicking rocker “Life Is a Dream” to the soulful and simmering “Games” to his masterful ode to geographic displacement, “Canyon Road” — all featured on the 2018 Mekong Xpress album, “Common Knowledge.”

But his first set of recordings under his own name was nearly lost when White’s long-tenured Apple laptop died. The files were retrieved, but several plugins — virtual tools for sonic fine-tuning — couldn’t be recovered without a rebuilding process that “would have taken a long time and maybe a good amount of money,” White says.

The standstill was broken some months later when he and co-producer Todd Herrington listened back and determined, with the benefit of hindsight, that the project could be considered complete. “It’s pretty clear where the records are right now is its own thing,” White says. It’s still to be determined how and when these 10 songs will make their way into the world, but the first single, “Heavy Heart,” landed just ahead of White’s late-November set opening for Modern Groove Syndicate, for whom Todd Herrington plays bass. Herrington is the one who encouraged White to start recording on his laptop in the mid-2010s, and he accompanied White during every step of this recording process — from tracking to resurrection to sending the files to Grammy-nominated mastering engineer Kim Rosen, who worked last-minute “magic,” as Herrington puts it.

Knowing how close it came to vanishing turns “Heavy Heart” into a reminder of how fortunate each new song must be to reach listeners’ ears, lending additional meaning when White sings, “My heavy heart will never forget / The very moment our glances met.”

Style Weekly: When was “Heavy Heart” written?

Ben White: I was living at my brother’s house, so I think it was probably around 2016. Looking back, it’s been a while. We were doing the Mondays at Mekong, I was playing with the Trongone Band still, and around that time I was starting to record some of my songs on my laptop.

Do you enjoy the process of self-recording?

Yeah, totally, especially at that time … I don’t know whether it was, “OK, let me get a demo recording, and then maybe later on we’ll take it to a real studio,” or — I guess it was more in that vein, and less of, “Alright, we’re going to do it all within the box of the laptop,” which is how it ended up turning out.

What made you change course?

We did it all on my old, 2008 or 2007 MacBook Pro … I don’t remember when — it might have been right around the start of the COVID pandemic — something happened with the hard drive and so that computer was pretty much done … We had demos — wav files of all the songs we had worked on up until the computer died. [So] we listened to those, and I think we were like, “This is as good as it’s going to get. This kinda just is what it is. Let’s leave this as a moment in time, like a project that’s complete in its own way, instead of trying to go back …”

We took the final demo records and then ran them through one of [Todd Herrington’s] old Yamaha cassette recorders, and it added a sound to the recordings, which were all digital on a computer, and added a fun, unique element to the recordings that we liked.

What made you decide on “Heavy Heart” for the first single?

There were two choices, because “Lowly Ground” and “Heavy Heart” were the two ones that were mastered, so both of those were ready to go… The Modern Groove show was on the horizon, so putting out a single would be a good thing to do before a show like that. “Heavy Heart” is a little more uptempo than “Lowly Ground,” so I felt like that might be a good one to put out first, to set the stage for what could come next.

How did that show go, from your perspective?

It felt great. [For] me and [drummer] Kelli [Strawbridge] and Todd, that’s only the second time we’ve played all those songs in a performance, and it was the first show that we actually got to have a couple of rehearsals. It’s still very new for all three of us, but I definitely felt like it was a step in the right direction for sure.

What other gigs have you played of late?

BW: I was playing with Cris Jacobs for the past few years, but not anymore. I guess over the past year that kind of stopped happening. My main focus has been in my own little world, in my room preparing for what’s happening now with my music and the trio. The [keyboard] setup I’m using [is] a monster in and of itself. That’s been my main focus, and I played some gigs with my friend John Bradberry, and I’ve been doing a few weddings and corporate events to pay the bills, but musically, my main drive is my music and the songs that I’ve written.

How did you land on the synth sounds you’re using now?

Compared to the time I spend writing the songs, I’ve spent, I don’t even know, 100 times the amount just working on the sounds of the song … [With] “Canyon Road,” it might have taken me an hour or two to have the whole song complete. But over the past year, with the setup I’m using now, with the three synthesizers, I think I’ve put well into 100 hours plus working on the sounds and making sure things are connected right between the keyboards, because there’s a lot of inner dialogue happening via MIDI between the synthesizers. Putting the sounds together is a me-waking-up-and-going-to-work kind of thing.

Are you writing all the time, or do songs come more sporadically?

I think it’s a little of both. I have a little room in my house with my piano and keyboards and computer, so everything’s ready to go if anything hits me. But I also, every day, sit down at the piano and not necessarily write, but work on music … I have a few notebooks of words and a lot of recorded melodies and chord progressions, so I’d say a good percentage of the way I write songs is putting the words from my notebook to a melody that I already have written … I might not have even been able to imagine any words that could have gone along with that melody when I initially wrote it, but lo and behold there’s these words I wrote a month ago or three years ago that fit right there.

Do you have any gigs coming up?

2023 is done, but [in] 2024, I’m looking forward to playing as much as I can. I think I only played maybe four shows with this project in 2023, so I don’t think it’ll be too much harder to play more than that. Hopefully a lot more than that.

“Heavy Heart” can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.