After writing and recording one new song per week, and then posting it on his website every Monday, for 52 weeks, all on his own, Ari Hest was definitely ready for some outside input when it came time to record his new disc, “Sunset Over Hope Street.”

That input came from producer / multi-instrumentalist Alex Wong, who has toured and recorded with Vienna Teng over the years, and also produced her last album.

As a result, the new disc, which comes out today, is a departure of sorts for Hest. The instrumentation is different, for starters: Most of those 52 songs in 52 weeks (in 2008-’09) featured just him, his guitar and maybe one other instrument for texture. And there’s a fair amount of orchestration and string arrangements, mostly complements of producer Wong.

“Alex wrote the string parts,” notes Hest, who comes to The Ark on Friday with a percussionist “who will be playing a hybrid drum / percussion kit, and sometimes looping his rhythm parts, and I’ll be switching off from guitar to piano.”

The piano is also more prominently featured on “Hope Street,” due to another conscious decision Hest made as a reaction to his “52” project, which is what Hest dubbed his yearlong commitment to write, record and post one song per week.

“I wanted to take my guitar parts, and re-work them for the piano or other instruments to see if one of them could take the guitar’s place as the lead instrument,” says Hest by phone from New York City, where he lives. “I write almost everything on guitar, and I just wanted to hear how the songs would sound without having the guitar as the driving force.” In some cases on “Hope Street,” the strings carry the melody.

“Hope Street” is also unlike Hest’s previous discs in that it was recorded over a long period of time — more than a year. So, Hest and Wong were able to take more time, listen back to the tapes and edit - which was a luxury he didn’t experience on his previous discs — or during the “52” project.

“Yeah, after having just recorded and released so many songs over the course of a year, I thought it would be good to be able to slow down the process a bit, even though I continued writing all the time, which is normal for me

“Plus, I knew before we started that both Alex and I were going to be touring a lot, and so we were not going to have time to just sit down and devote one big block of time to making this record,” says Hest.

“So, weeks would go by between recording sessions, which gave us time to think more about what we’d recorded. There was some second- and third-guessing, and occasionally that helped, and sometimes it didn’t. But I’d say that working like that in most cases did end up with us adding something to the song that made it better.

“Like, I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my vocal tracks, so I did scrap a few vocal takes and re-record them.

The songs explore various themes. There are a couple of examples of existential musing — songs like “Until Next Time” and “A Good Look Around” — and there are also a couple of politically-minded songs — “Business of America” and “Swan Song,” for example.

On “Until Next Time,” Hest ponders “what might have been” when he recalls moments when “I caught eyes with a woman, but didn’t approach her, and I would think about it the next of the day, and maybe regret not having followed through, and considered the possibilities that might have transpired between us."

And “Business of America” was written at the height of the debate over health care reform.

“I usually don’t get political in my writing, but all of that was happening at the time, and I have s----y insurance, and I play on an amateur baseball team, and I have a shoulder problem, and had to go in for an MRI," explains Hest.

"So I got the okay from my insurance company to get it done. But then I suddenly got bombarded by all of these letters from them, asking me things like. ‘Did you have this condition before you took out this policy?’ and asking me to have all of my medical records, from all of these different doctors, sent to them. It was just ridiculous.”

If there is an underlying theme that runs through the album, however, it is the passing of time — even though Hest did not consciously set out to examine that theme.

“No, it was more unconscious,” says Hest. “After I had completed the “52” project, I would catch myself thinking, ‘Well, that’s as good as it’s going to get with my music, I’ve just succeeded at doing this really ambitious thing, so what’s left?’ I actually thought that my music career was coming to a close, because I didn’t know what to do as a follow-up to that.

“So, I was definitely thinking that it was possible that one chapter of my life was ending, and wondering what the next chapter would consist of. I actually was offered a job as a math teacher, I thought about taking it.

“But the more I thought about it, I realized that I just love music too much to stop making it. I couldn’t really stop writing and singing. If I’m not busy creating something, I can get really depressed.”

Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.