Rene Lopez - A New York Lie (2025) Hi-Res

Rene Lopez is gracing the music world this week with a new album produced by Patrick Sansone of Wilco: A New York Lie. It’s not an alt-rock Wilco-style affair though; there’s more of a ranging between rootsy confessional rock, touches of funk, honky tonk dive bar sentiments and even doses of cajun and latin rock beats. Rene takes all the good parts of these various American music anchors and spins them together into a tale of living life out walking the city streets after the ideal bubble bursts.

The messages in the album outline the struggle of being alone for some time with echoes of old relationships still rising and reverberating in your mind, combined with the near misses and the ups and downs of good times and not-so-good times that rise and fall in a real life, a real New York City life more precisely.

“That’s The Truth” starts out with distant ambience before pulling you in to a reflective, heart-on-your-sleeve honest confession: “I’ve been walking the streets of Manhattan since the ’80s without you / I’ve been on my feet searching for my lady, that’s the truth, that’s the truth.” The music gather around the lyrics with guitar, pedal, steel, and an easy pace.

Picking up the pace, on ‘Feelin’ Right As Rain” there’s rising pedal steel and a Western feel, and a reference to the Stones “it’s better to burn out than fade away” – a well-placed insertion of a short but universally relatable line. “Please Don’t Give Up” is a two step honky tonk dance number with elegant pedal steel and the beseeching lines: “I’ve burned many bridges that I helped rebuild, I made decisions that almost got me killed, please don’t give up on me just yet.”

“Goin’ back to Lovin'” regales the listener with an extended electric guitar solo and showcases Rene’s ability to belt out the more rockin’ styles with Santana- style rhythms and “going back to loving myseeeeeelllllf.”

“Baby Go and Fly” is an upbeat addition to the album, filled with truly good wishes and a mature perspective on letting go of someone you love: “it’s not what it seems “so you disappear, baby go and fly to the sunshine, feel the wind blow away the time, I won’t be a storm and bring you thunder, without me everything will be all right.” The electric guitar carries spaces and the tambourine adds a little lilt.

On “Didn’t Know Any Better” there’s accordion and a washboard cajun pump up to the night on the town feel of the relationship’s beginning and how it feels 20 years later to have gone your separate ways: “now I’m living in my downtown life, and you’re just another uptown girl, we once had the most amazing times.”

Further down in the track sequence is the title track and the emotional vulnerability comes out in a more hushed number that anchors the album’s message: “This night’s been rough, I can’t be alone … I was a spouse, I had a wife, my fairy tale New York life. The punishment becomes my drug, the more I sin the more she loves and give me false hope and pride….” Here we land on the heart of the album and its message: really the one true thing in life is struggle with twinges of regrets, feeling up and then feeling down, on and on.