Songs For The Seance

Description

Andrés Miguel Cervantes reinvents his desert western noir soundscapes with the release of his second album, Songs for the Seance, out on the independent label Speakeasy Studios SF. Born and raised in San Diego, but based in the San Diego Bay area, Cervantes draws inspiration from songwriters Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Fred Neil and singers Vicente “Chente” Fernandez, George Jones and Merle Haggard. Cervantes’ lyrics and songwriting are infused with his own personality, with beautiful, haunting images of inner and outer landscapes, performed with virtuosic folk guitar playing and fingerpicking that evokes Bert Jansch meeting Mississippi John Hurt at the crossroads of a dark desert road. Songs For The Seance is a meditation on the memories that inhabit us all, lived, dreamed, or inherited from our ancestors. It addresses themes of identity, the need to belong, loss, isolation, and hope. Songs that soar through haunting black soundscapes, about communicating with our ghosts, about facing what haunts us and about knowing that “there is a certain victory in staying alive.” Songs For The Seance is a moving and expansive follow-up to Cervantes’ internationally acclaimed debut album, The Crossing. Cervantes returns to the studio with producer Alicia Vanden Heuvel to record again on Otari 8-track ½", an analog process, with contributions from his bandmates Jacob Aranda (pedal steel, violin), Jessie Leigh Smith (harmonica), Raphi Gottesman (drums), Alicia Vanden Heuvel (bass, vocals, percussion), Hall McCann (lead guitar, vocals), Graham Norwood (guitar), Conor Riley (piano) and Noelle Fiore (vocals). Songs For The Seance was born from Cervantes’ meditative writing process, shaped during his travels through the Southwest, from the Mojave and Sonora deserts, along the coast, to where the Pacific Ocean meets the bays of San Diego and San Francisco. Cervantes’ writing on Songs For The Seance explores themes of the soul, of the love one feels, of darkness and light, of the feeling of being haunted, disturbed and yet in search of hope. a reflection on collective and ancestral memory, inherited and lived, in our families, with our loved ones.