BIO:

“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.

Out of college, Eliot was largely unemployed, broke and on the move between tours, recording projects, artist residencies and housesitting gigs throughout North America and Europe for several years. He was a founding member of the Splendor All Around songwriting collective in Berkeley that toured the West Coast in a blue school bus, doubling as a venue for intimate acoustic shows. He lived and played with veteran songwriter Victoria Williams in Joshua Tree and through her befriended Mark Olsen of the Jayhawks and Mike Watt of the Minutemen. He developed a reputation on the road as a prolific and versatile songwriter with a commanding live presence.

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.

An opportunity to produce a third album in this “Handheld Recordings” series as an artist-in-residence at an arts and ecology co-op in Washington state was Eliot’s calling card to move out of the hotel and head back West. A period of heavy touring followed that concluded with Eliot moving into a shotgun in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. For the next three years he led musical walking tours of the French Quarter and Tremé neighborhoods and went underground with his songwriting during the pandemic.

A chance encounter at a Mardi Gras parade led to Eliot uprooting once again, this time to Ojai, California. Eliot now works as a private music and songwriting teacher in Ojai and spends his free time adding to and refining his catalog of hundreds of original songs. He continues to collaborate with multi-instrumentalist and engineer Evan Backer, who he’s been producing recordings with for 15 years under the moniker, “Evan and Eliot on Earth Productions.”

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.”

TRACK BY TRACK:

Dandelion Wine

I set out to write something in the style of The Band. I actually imagined The Band (probably back when they were still the Hawks) arriving worn down at a local rodeo in the middle of nowhere on a day off from tour, and Levon or Rick having a fling with an endearing lady rodeo clown that turns into something more… Props to Tyler Nuffer for whipping out the amazing pedal steel solo on this in a single take.

Going Down

This is loosely based on a breakup I had with my live-in quarantine girlfriend in New Orleans. I tried to channel some Aimee Mann energy for this. There are references to Professor Longhair and Leonard Cohen songs tucked in. My co-producer Evan Backer did a great job executing the synth arrangement at the end.

Coronation Song

This song was originally released in 2018 on my album The Hotel Life, which was recorded while working the graveyard shift at the front desk of a hotel in Atlanta using a digi 4-track recorder. We beefed up the arrangement a bit for this. It’s the only song on the album where the lead vocals were overdubbed. The lyrics are my reflections on the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, which is spelled out in the music video we made for it.

Swallow Bird

I started writing this song when I was moving cross-country from New Orleans to Southern California after the pandemic. The initial idea came when I was in a hurry to pack up from my friend’s place I stayed at in Austin and get back on the road. I came across the voice memo a year later, once settled, and fleshed it out. During quarantine I got a hold of some binoculars and spent a lot of time getting to know the neighborhood birds while mulling over my existence.

Farms in Hawaii

This one was inspired by a documentary I saw about Father Yod and the Source Family, a hippy cult that formed in the late ‘60s in Hollywood and then relocated to Hawaii. After the leader died and the cult dissolved, some of the former members went on to become pioneers in sustainable agriculture and the ‘90s tech boom, which I thought was worth writing a song about. I tried to evoke the Laurel Canyon countrified hippy folk rock of that era.

Avalanche of Sunshine

I wrote this one in an armadillo-infested forest on the outskirts of New Orleans while thinking about my friend and former bandmate Sean Conlon back in Georgia who somehow manages to go through life with a permanently blissed-out perspective. A modern day mystic if there ever was one. Took some CCR and Allman Bros roots rock flavor for this.

California Blues

This song is about the deep depression I fell into in New Orleans during the pandemic. I felt culturally isolated and wanted to get back West but it seemed utterly hopeless. I drew influence from Blaze Foley and the Rolling Stones’ version of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain”. I thought Evan did an amazing job on the arrangement—really captured the feeling of the massive barges floating somberly up and down the Mississippi from the spot on the levee where I’d to go to sing my blues.

Silhouette

This is the first song I wrote when I moved into the tiny house in Los Padres National Forest where I now reside. It’s a dada stream-of-consciousness kinda joint that if anything is probably about aging and change. I was going for a VU minimalist rock vibe. Cory Hanson later pointed out the back-up vocals have a Beach Boys’ “Kokomo” feel to them. LOL.