We are in the depths of November, a terrifying second Trump administration is preparing to take over in America next year, with this backdrop, we are debuting the uplifting new video from California outsider songwriter Eliot Eidelman for his new single ‘Avalanche of Sunshine’ a pure melodic hit of “radical optimism” off his upcoming album Silhouette. The video transports you back to carefree summers when he could rollerblade past sun-kissed shorelines, watch it below. Eliot has spent the past decade travelling the US taking inspiration from all the tiny scenes that make up America and blending it all down to his own unique style that moves from optimistic pop to introspective slow-core and back again.
He says “I wrote Avalanche of Sunshine in an amarillo-infested forest on the outskirts of New Orleans. It’s a tribute to my buddy Peyton in Georgia who goes through life with an infectious happy-go-lucky attitude and writes parody country songs. I was going for the classic Southern rock sound of bands like CCR and the Allman Bros, done in my own quirky, heartfelt way. The video was filmed the morning after election night with the Santa Ana winds raging and the Mountain Fire billowing smoke ominously in the distance. Debris was flying everywhere and I came about an inch from being taken out by a falling palm frond (as you can see in the video), but that didn’t stop us from finishing out a hilariously fun shoot.”
“All I need is a cabin in the woods with a piano,” has been Eliot Eidelman’s refrain since experiencing a creative outburst at an artist residency in the Mojave that spawned the material for his first solo album back in 2014. Nearly a decade and seven releases later, his dream for Thoreauvian artistic solitude came true when he settled into a tiny house trailer in a remote canyon outside of Ojai, California, with just enough room to fit a Baldwin upright. Silhouette is the first album since the radical lifestyle shift toward complete devotion to his art. “I stopped going out, drinking and smoking, and just got into a flow where I’m always creating and honing my sound.”
In the fall of 2023 Eliot reconvened with longtime collaborator Evan Backer of Wand for a series of recording sessions that yielded dozens of tracks covering Eliot’s time as a live-in graveyard shift manager of a rock’n’roll hotel in Atlanta, his years as a musical tour guide of historic New Orleans, and his current chapter as a hermitic canyon creature. Silhouette is the first collection from these sessions to see the light of day, featuring a distinctive classic Americana palette soaked in Tyler Nuffer’s pedal steel and a playful, rebellious attitude that has long been a trademark of Eliot’s lyrical style, now more refreshing than ever.
Eliot has been a songwriter from the womb. He was humming tunes before he could utter a word. The earliest originals that are still in his repertoire date back to age seven, when he first picked up a guitar. By 13 he was Dylan-obsessed, leading a band of fellow middle schoolers and cutting his first recordings. A jolting early adolescent cross-country move from the San Francisco Bay Area to Atlanta thrust him into a blossoming freak folk scene and regular rock gigs on the bar circuit while still in high school. He made a brief foray into the Athens scene before heading back west to enroll at CalArts and study music with Wadada Leo Smith.
While at CalArts, Eliot fronted the experimental rock ensemble Realization Orchestra with distinguished jazz players and future members of Ty Segall Band and Wand. Realization Orchestra toured widely playing DIY shows on the West Coast and cut two EP-length song-suites before dissolving as members graduated from CalArts and went their separate ways. Eliot played guitar in the Sacramento-based instrumental avant-prog outfit Gentleman Surfer for a couple tours of the Western US before tiring of the noisy experimental rock scene and returning to his roots as a lyrical acoustic songwriter.
At age 26, burnt out from years of transience, living out of a van and sleeping on couches, he sought refuge in Atlanta’s equivalent to the Chelsea Hotel as a musicians’ haven, the Highland Inn. He was assigned a post as an overnight manager and moved into the room that Cole and Zumi of Black Lips had just vacated, where he resided for the next two years. There he recorded and produced two albums on a handheld digi 4-track recorder, often while also manning the front desk of the hotel and the errant shenanigans that entailed in the late-night hours.
Says Eliot of his current process, “I often wake up in the morning with a tune in my head, a lingering remnant from the dream state. I climb down from the loft and try to draw it out with words on the piano or guitar into a working song as swiftly as possible. I don’t question where my musical and lyrical ideas come from. If I wonder what other people are going to make of them, it totally shuts me down creatively. I’m willing and eager to explore the dark places, to discover unseemly characters and take big risks. I feel it’s my duty as an artist to channel the unconscious unfiltered, without the heavy burden of societal opinions and expectations weighing down on me. The notion that song lyrics should make the singer-speaker always appear “likable” to the audience seems extremely limiting to me. If we demanded our characters always be likable across other forms of writing, the state of narrative art would be in a very boring place. I’m committed to keeping things interesting by exploring all aspects of the human condition in song.”
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