SCOTT HIRSCH - LOST PADRES - ECHO MAGIC / SOUNDLY

Something inside me changed during the last few years I spent making Lost Padres, my fourth full length record. A certain lack of self-consciousness slowly crept in. One day you’re up to your ears in bullshit, and then suddenly you’ve freed yourself from it completely. The funny part is that when you’re swimming in it you have no idea, and when you emerge, it’s plain as day.

So that’s where I’m at. No bullshit. I’ll lay this on you as plain as I can: I wrote a record about what it’s like to have a midlife crisis. It’s called Lost Padres.

Let me be honest: It happened to me. Man or woman, no one can escape that lost feeling, that rupture that descends seemingly out of nowhere. Lost Padres contends with this. And because I live on the edge of the Los Padres national forest, where I hike and listen to my rough mixes, I even made a middle-aged-dad pun out of it. That’s my cheeky nod to the forty-something life I am owning up to here.

Yes, I know, “midlife crisis” signals the image of a pathetic man with a receding hairline in wraparound shades who just leased a Maserati. But my experience was not like that at all. When I decided to shed my fear of this stigma and look at it head on, Lost Padres started to take shape.

But what exactly does the music of a shaken identity sound like?

I wanted the sonic textures to be close, inside the head. Not outwardly expansive, but rather, inwardly vast. Like the echoes of the shadows of the mind. I wondered, how can I record the sound of that 3 AM gaze from bed out the window at the moon when you don’t know who you are or where you are going? Perhaps it’s the sound of me inside my small studio with the wood paneled walls fucking around with a borrowed Prophet synth running through an old tube spring reverb. Sounds like some specific kind of midlife crisis doesn’t it? It did to me. And I kept exploring that sound, that feeling it evoked, with bubbling vintage drum boxes and fizzy synth textures, admiring the way they lived alongside the vulnerable sounds of breath on a saxophone reed and the gentle scrape of fingers on nylon strings.

Lost Padres adheres to my affinity to treat records as complete thoughts. I wanted the lyrics to weave around themselves, relating and referencing one another throughout.

The Lost Padre emerged as a searcher, a man questioning his choices of love and life, and looking for a way to square his past with his future days. As the ubiquitous drag of time erodes him, he becomes one of los perdidos— the lost ones. And that’s where we pick him up on the first track “When Things Fall Apart”— a man who lost faith in his luck. Languid lap steel and synths lay beneath ropy guitars, as our narrator contends with the wolves at his door. Only, in an ironic twist of fate, they’re begging him for grace. As the refrain swells with its bittersweet melody, we learn that love may inevitably break your heart, but it can also save you- if you can find it in its true form.

On “Future King,” The Lost Padre is once again searching, looking for a very specific rhythm. If found, it could trigger the resonant vibration that opens a portal to forgiveness, belonging, and eternal love. That would signal either the anointing of the Future King, or a tailspin into darkness. This rhythm, with its pulsating staccato lifeline, holds us until we get the satisfying release of the chorus. As the groove penetrates, we must close our eyes to see, yet as the harmonies insist, we can never know our future.

We’ll follow the songs of our Lost Padre as he waxes nostalgic beneath the oak tree (Dandelion Wine), across the Texas plains (Pecos River), up in the old hotel (Hey Perdido), all the way to the banks of the swollen river (The Fool), searching all the while for how and why it all slipped away.

Ultimately, this record evolved into a roadmap, a sonic strategy to get back home, a touchstone test of what you value as truth to see if it’s real or fool’s gold.

-Scott Hirsch