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Look, I’m not gonna blame you if you hear me describing this album and artist and your initial reaction is “no thanks, I’m good”—I felt the same way when I was being sold on yet another confessional, folk-leaning singer-songwriter LP whose title is literally just the guy’s name. I get if you are tapped out on artists from Philadelphia and have begun recoiling at comparisons to Alex G and Elliott Smith as their influence becomes increasingly inescapable.
But here’s the thing: that’s exactly why the self-titled Greg Mendez LP is so damn undeniable. Even with every surface-level detail stacked against it, this record instantly became one of my favorites of the year and melted my skepticism away.
At the same time, though, the understated brilliance of this album and this artist makes it weird to talk about in superlative terms, specifically because the undoing of mystery and artistic pretense is exactly what makes the music of Greg Mendez work so well for me. The last thing I want to do is be overly flowery or reduce this thing to clichés of mental health and substance abuse, or use the word “powerful,” specifically because this is an album that plays all the minor notes of a typical formula.
This isn’t the first album from Greg Mendez, it’s his third or fourth proper release (depending on who’s counting) along with a number of Bandcamp splits and demos that date back as early 2006, but it feels like an introduction for more reasons than it being this self-titled album that has put him on a much larger map beyond his home city of Philadelphia. Around 2015, Mendez got clean and shortly after released his first proper solo records, quickly developing the kind of local hero-type reputation that prompts other Philly bands to literally write songs about Greg Mendez and how world peace could be achieved if more people were like him:
“Me and all my friends wanna be Greg Mendez
He’s got a beautiful voice and every song he writes is the best song you’ve ever heard
He’s got those pretty eyes and the best damn wife
If more people on this earth were like Greg, it would be at peace
If every single person on the planet was Greg Mendez, we’d live in a world of peace”
Even though I love this song and how cute its sentiment is, there’s part of me that wishes we could talk about something so direct and sincere as Greg Mendez without resorting to either saccharine platitudes or ironic bits (I’m totally self-incriminating here). “Intimacy” and “honest storytelling” have become terrible press clichés in an era where “confessional” singer songwriters like Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers reign supreme—but that doesn’t mean those aren’t artistic ideals worth pursuing, and there’s not a drop of cynicism in this album’s attempts at autobiography. Unlike Alex G, the current artist he shares some surface-level songwriting similarities with, there’s no layer of abstraction or fiction designed to let the singer hide from having to talk about what the songs are “about” in interviews. These songs plainly and unfussily detail real experiences, without dumping in the entire diary entry. It’s easy to reduce a song as moving as closer “Hoping You’re Doing Okay” down to cutsey music writer quips like “Randy Newman’s ‘You Got A Friend In Me’ for people who have lost a loved one to a Fentanyl overdose,” but the way Mendez keeps these songs grounded and honest prevents my dumb Tweets from dimming the power (oh no, I did the thing I said I wasn’t going to do) of the record’s actual mode of communication.
Yes, there’s a crack den invoked on this album, and there are two people in an unhealthy relationship with each other and their substances of choice, but the album never mines those conflicts for cheap melodrama. The things that linger with you are less the crack den and more the heartbreakingly mundane details like “My auntie let us in / her name was Mendez, no relation.” Even though this album is heart-rending at various moments, there’s a danger in reducing everything down to “sad.” As Greg says himself in an interview, “I guess that people think the songs are sad a lot of the time. But I don’t know if I really think that. I kinda like things that feel like a bunch of different things at once.” This isn’t an album about the worst thing to ever happen to someone, and it’s about the day after. The exhale, the moment of picking yourself up off the ground and taking a few steps forward. The awkwardness and regular-ness of living after these everyday struggles that don’t offer neat lessons or resolutions.
He’s writing exactly what happened to him without gilding the lily or reaching for a sweaty metaphor, and yet these songs are so deeply poetic because of how carefully his words are chosen. Lines like “I don’t mind if you stay tonight / It’s just another promise you never meant,” on the opener “Rev. John / Friend,” could hit like daggers if delivered with enough venom, but Mendez underplays them to a different but equally devastating effect. The aching way he delivers the line “I know you’re scheming again tonight” on “Cop Caller” is enough to communicate an entire novel’s worth of who these two people are to each other and what the rest of this song is going to be about, and he never overshares to the point of maudlin wallowing. There are a lot of bitter feelings here, but there’s a reason the sentiment at the end of the album is so positive. No matter how bad it gets, he never lets hackneyed Big Sad instincts get in the way of expressing a more complicated idea, and always returns warmth and compassion.
All artists, whether their work is autobiographical or not, make things that reflect the person that made it either consciously or subconsciously, so it’s entirely natural to have interest in the real biographies of artists as you try to connect the dots. But there’s a danger in making that relationship between backstory and artistic meaning too one-to-one, telling, not showing, in a way that makes the act of confession a much more boring form of expression and closes off the part of art where the audience projects themselves onto the music. GREG MENDEZ avoids these pitfalls by choosing the exact right details, painfully specific and universal at the same time. The album’s brisk runtime and pacing help this too; every song is so razor-sharp in its writing that it rarely needs more than two-to-three minutes and a handful of lines to illuminate entire years of history between characters. There’s a first-thought-best-thought quality to these songs that makes them feel off-the-cuff—his Stereogum interview with Danielle Chelosky mentions that he recorded this album on workers’ comp after suffering a concussion on a construction job, so “some of these songs,” he reckons, “almost literally fell out of his head”—but there’s a careful construction to this album belied by the fact that certain songs like “Hoping Your Doing Okay” have existed on demos as old as 2009.
Obviously, writing with this much clarity doesn’t come easily. This album keeps it simple, stupid—but writing songs this direct is only possible by spending a good 15 years in search of the exact right way to say that simple thing. Greg himself admits this hasn’t always been the case of his songwriting, lamenting on past releases where he felt he “was hiding behind things that didn’t make sense, and maybe trying to sound smarter than [he was] or something, and just kinda obscuring things.” But on GREG MENDEZ, he makes this impossible task way easier than it looks. As fellow Philadelphia songwriter Mr. Goblin put it in his Talkhouse interview with Mendez, Greg writes songs “that feel so complete and self-evident you might kick yourself for not having thought of them first… They’re honest without feeling self-involved, tuneful but not overcomplicated, and generally just have this golden brown quality, like they were taken out of the oven at precisely the correct moment.”
So maybe it’s no wonder Greg Mendez has stood out as the breakout artist in such a crowded field this year. Perhaps it’s the very fact that we get so much music these days that is desperately striving and aspiring to accomplish what this album does just by… existing. There’s a very likable, shrugs-shoulders quality about the way it all comes out, like a friend telling you a bittersweet little story that seems incidental to them but moves you deeply. When you ask Greg what he was going for musically on this record, he doesn’t cite Elliott Smith’s XO or Alex G’s TRICK. He says:
I could go on longer about this record, or further explain why this album differentiates from the Alex G formula or whatever, but I think you can tell at this point that you’re better off just listening to the album and meeting Greg for yourself. Take a long walk on a sunny morning with his album playing in your headphones, you’ll feel a little lighter by the end of it.
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