David Mead - January, San Fernando (2025) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. Amelia
02. Maybe You've Had Enough
03. The Shoreditch Local
04. Kicking The Can
05. Dead Man's Cake
06. Irrelevant
07. Confidence Man
08. Anesthesia
09. Someone, Somewhere
10. San Leandro

Hello, David Mead here. I am writing to tell you about my new album, “January, San Fernando.” It is my ninth, and I love it a lot. I have been doing this for awhile, long enough to remember when a major label (still a thing?) used to pay a professional writer a lot of money to write bios, these strange narratives that were supposed to describe music and summarize the lifetimes that go into making it. In five paragraphs. Weirdness, always.

So let’s cut to the chase as quickly as possible. As for me: Syosset, Nashville, East Village, RCA, albums, tours, BBC, tours, Taylor Swift, TV, film, Peter Gabriel, tours, marriage, children, Rachael Ray, property maintenance, architecture. More or less. The finer points are just a few clicks away, if you feel compelled.

But let’s talk “January, San Fernando.” This one got going back in 2023 when my soul brother, producer and episodic drummer Ethan Eubanks, called to suggest that we get his new home studio warmed up by making an album in it. No pressure, nothing heavy, just take a week in Philadelphia to see what might happen. We quickly enlisted our other constant companion, our Dutch bottom end, Whynot Jansveld, who re-routed himself from a Wallflowers tour and met us at Ethan’s place in Fishtown.

Given that we had not made any music together in 12 years, the songs we tracked that week sounded pretty good, but not quite good enough to transcend the inherent latency that will arise when three adults in three separate cities attempt to finish a project with no fixed endpoint on the horizon. Our odds improved dramatically in December when Whynot happened to be cutting another album with engineer/producer Dave Spreng who, upon hearing about our unfinished Philadelphian opus, generously offered the use of his studio in Los Angeles, Dave’s Room, as well as his engineering services, to finish off the tracks.

This was a massive gift. The possibilities inherent in six days at an historic studio manned by a crack engineer filled me with a hope and optimism that manifested itself in a new batch of songs; the Philadelphia suite would have to return to the pot and emerge at a different juncture.

Given our time constraints, we quickly decided that we could not pull it all off alone, so Ethan and Whynot hired two legendary musicians to help us find our way: Larry Goldings- a jazz titan known for his keyboard work with everyone from Jack DeJohnette to Maceo Parker- and Val McCallum, a soulful guitarist who had worked with Sheryl Crow, Lucinda Williams and was currently in Jackson Browne’s band.

Thus outfitted, we all piled into Dave’s Room on January 15th and got down to it. Things began going very well, very quickly. The tunes were fresh off the press; no one besides Whynot and I had ever heard them before. I was able to listen to the songs transform from vapor to solids right before my very ears, a celestial magic trick I was more accustomed to enabling in other people’s music than witnessing in my own. Ethan, Whynot and Dave were piloting the ship, so all I had to do was strum a little guitar and sing along to the work of the insanely gifted musicians around me. “Amelia” grew into something that felt like Paul Simon taking Mumford and Sons out for a long night of jello shots; “Maybe You’ve Had Enough” assumed a kind of Southern Gothic pose, even before Kathleen Edwards added her crystalline pipes to the mix. “Confidence Man” and “Irrelevant” found the right kind of punch to counterpoint their apologetic natures, while “Dead Man’s Cake” took on a wholly unexpected gospel transcendence.

After you’ve already put out a bunch of albums, people understandably want to know what’s different about the new one. Fair question and, in this case, easy to answer: Brotherhood. Ethan, Whynot and I have been making music together since we were (basically) kids: Carroll Gardens, East Village, 15 passenger vans, Sprinter vans, States, Europe, that girl, this girl. We are all now middle-aged men with mid-life responsibilities, and it is rare to get to step back into the fever dream of musical creation together.

I have made a lot of albums for which supporting musicians show up for the early days, then leave me to my own devices with an engineer and producer for the duration. It is kind of fun to play god for awhile, but it can get lonely and disorienting. While “January, San Fernando” is not a wild reinvention of the stylistic wheel, it distinguishes itself in my catalog by the fact that Ethan, Whynot and Dave were there for every single minute of its creation. We made all of its decisions together and, though I got to put my name on the cover, it is every bit as much their album as mine.

For one week in North Hollywood, we had the distinct pleasure of discovering these songs together. Like the friendships they came from, these recordings keep revealing new things about themselves to me. My greatest hope for them is that they might serve as a celebratory soundtrack for the life you have lived, the experiences you have had along the way and the people that have stayed by your side for all of it. Thanks for listening.

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