Today, acclaimed Detroit singer-songwriter Ethan Daniel Davidson announced his new album Lear, a companion piece to his recent album Cordelia, which was released earlier this year via Blue Arrow Records. Lear was also co-produced by Luther Dickinson and David Katznelson and deepens the allegorical and reflective songcraft that Davidson established on Cordelia. Out on November 14, Lear is a rich, legs-stretched companion to its counterpart where Davidson draws from his life’s experiences like water from a freshly tapped well. Lear’s eight songs possess a distinct ache akin to Neil Young’s On the Beach. Every lyric, a new road to be explored, and Davidson, the perfect guide to the journey.
Along with the announcement, Davidson shares the lead single “Stop Breaking Down,” the lush and echoing opener which nods to two country classics—Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”—written in one sitting, but drawn from a lifetime of stories (some truer than others).
Listen to “Stop Breaking Down”
“My songs have become more autobiographical,” Davidson reflects on the track. “I’m recounting my own experiences with heartbreak and being on the road. When I was younger, I was hitchhiking around—throwing everything I had off the back of a train and trying to escape whatever life I had as a younger person. I had some bad experiences in some different towns, and my heart has been broken in a thousand different ways. I don't even see through the same eyes anymore.”
Lear, Davidson’s fourteenth studio album, emerged from the same sessions that birthed Cordelia. He’s accompanied by the same crackerjack team: producers Katznelson and Dickinson, bassist and Emmylou Harris collaborator Byron House, drummer Marco Giovino (Robert Plant, John Cale), and pedal steel legend Rayfield “Ray Ray” Holloman. At first blush, these tunes might appear more deceptively upbeat than the ruminations on Cordelia, but fear not—Davidson is still mining the dark corners of his own psyche to great aplomb.
“It’s me trying to figure out what's happening inside of myself,” he explains, while reflecting on the lyrical headspace he inhabits throughout Lear. “I'm a positive person, but this is a part of my own psychological healing process, which we should all engage in. We're all wounded people, in some kind of way—and I've figured out how to confront that through music and storytelling.” Sometimes, that means confronting his own catalog, as “Count the Knives” revisits the original’s easy-shaking arrangement as captured on 2015’s Drawnigh and reshapes the tune into a lovingly languid, slow-burning soul tune. “It's cool to rediscover my own music in this manner—it’s like I'm covering myself. The approach to the music is completely different, so I’m discovering new things in the song itself.”
There’s a thematic thread that unites Shakespeare’s Cordelia and Lear in which Davidson has consistently found parallels to his own life. “King Lear had a real resonance with me,” he explains. “I always identified with Cordelia, because she wasn't after her father for money or anything like that—she just loved him. My adopted father was very successful, and he had sycophants who tried to drag my reputation through the mud, to try and drive a wedge in between us. Whether or not he ultimately bought into that, it's hard to say—but the situation definitely made me feel more like Cordelia.”
Lear is imbued with the worldly perspective that Davidson—a newly ordained rabbi, having completed his ordination shortly after putting the final touches on the album—has long brought to his work as a thinker and storyteller. “When I look at the world and think about how we’d like to change things about it, we lack the political will to actually do anything about it,” he reflects. “As a global society, we just don’t have it. The way our information universe exists now, the world has somehow flattened out for all of us. We paint nuanced issues with broad brushes, but I want to tell people that the world isn’t really that way.”
Davidson’s messages ring loud and clear, marking yet another high point in a steadily expanding catalogue, which over the years has been praised by NPR Music, All Music, American Songwriter, Magnet Magazine and many more.
Lear Tracklist:
1. Stop Breaking Down
2. Count The Knives
3. The World We Wanted
4. Bad Company Brought Me Here
5. Not Breaking Hearts
6. How Can One Keep Warm
7. Waiting For Me
8. Goodbye
