"I'm wondering why you're fully dressed"
David Ramirez is a singer-songwriter who calls Austin, Houston and Dallas, Texas his haunts. His songs aren't just songs but sonic narratives where he can openly cast his soul out for the world to see. He just doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve but rather wears his heart like a well worn coat. Hell is the newest single off his upcoming album "My Love Is A Hurricane" due to drop on July 17th via Sweetworld Records / Thirty Tigers. As someone who listens and writes about artists and songs a great deal, I am blown away by the wealth of talent I find. It doesn't happen often but often enough to stoke my embers of appreciation for art and the human condition as expressed by art. Sometimes I am quietly blown away but Ramirez's track Hell blew the walls down around me and not because the song is an audaciously constructed.
Hell stuns for other reasons. From the onset, the sound is surprising for these times. It shuns some of the often utilized indie rock tropes of the day (to many to enumerate) and instead pushes a sound that while floating in a wonderful contemporary aesthetic hearkens back to sounds that feel uncannily in that mid-70's reality when funk and soul would seamlessly coexist with light jazz and rock / prog rock fusing into a synergistic colorless love-fest. It feels like a amalgam of Sly and the Family Stone, Bowie, Pink Floyd, Steely Dan as produced by Quincy Jones. It also feels utterly timeless and genre agnostic. Ramirez's vocals in and of themselves is so exquisitely soulful and real as to be anti-fashionable in the purest sense and I about fell off my chair when the Kelsey Wilson fueled third verse (Wild Child, Sir Woman) with piano runs flying happened. Damn. So fucking amazing.
Pre-order the new album: https://orcd.co/my-love-is-a-hurricane…
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM- PRESS NOTES:
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How do you write love songs when your heart is broken? How do you sing about hope and passion when yours is lost? How do you finish an album when the relationship that inspired it has ended?
During the Summer of 2017, David Ramirez had fallen in love with a woman who, despite having only just met, felt incredibly familiar to him. There was a scary but comfortable feeling of deja vu within their moments together. “In past relationships, no matter how eager I was to feel loved and to give love, there had always been a hesitation to crawl out of my old life. I didn’t feel this with her,” he recollects.
Ramirez began to pen songs for his next album and hopeful odes to new love spilled out. Songs like “Lover, Will You Lead Me?” filled with vivid images from the heart: I recognized you from some distant dream / Like when it rains on a cold day / I had a chill in my bones / Is it true what they say / “When you know, you know.”
These were followed by sultry, romantic ballads about how love matures and grows. He wrote “I Wanna Live In Your Bedroom” while sitting on his lover’s bed just minutes after waking up on a hazy fall day. “I was looking around at all the perfectly curated pieces in her room,” he says. “Everything was so intentional and held a story and a place in her heart. I wanted to be one of those pieces.”
One after another, Ramirez poured his soul into a new work of art that covered both the sweet parts of love and the hard times it can bring. He wrote about potential, survival, hope, and encouragement. He wrote about partnership.
But art is often bred from spontaneity and suffers under the confines of routines and borders. This is a conflicting dynamic that can cause massive problems when you’re building a partnership, when you’re part of a team. A seeming “whatever” attitude can foster insecurity and doubt in a lover. As more and more troubles emerged in his relationship, Ramirez found solace still at the tip of his pen, holding his guitar, sitting at his piano.
“I was born in August of 1983 just days after Hurricane Alicia had hit my hometown of Houston. As my relationship began ripping at the seams, I started to think of this storm as a precursor to my birth,” Ramirez confides. “Was there something in the universe that imprinted a characteristic of chaos in my blood during my last few days in the womb? Was I destined to wreak havoc everywhere I went?”
Soon, the relationship that had inspired a new burst of creativity in Ramirez, came to a sudden end. And with that ending, he still had one last song to write. His heart exhausted, he sat on his patio one night and tried to process all of the lyrics that he knew he had written, yet now left him feeling like a stranger to his own story. Through tears and muffled whimpers, he started to write down all of his negative thoughts about love and put the pain of his broken heart into words. From this emotional purge, he began to see the beauty in what he had gone through: the struggle, the pain, the confusion. He soon found himself writing the lyrics that would become album standout “Hallelujah, Love Is Real!”
“I was reminded of a great line in the film Vanilla Sky, ‘The sweet is never as sweet without the sour.’ I decided to celebrate Love,” he explains. “I wasn’t gonna write about how it made me feel in that moment. I was going to write about its existence and how thankful I am having known it.”
This chapter of Ramirez’s life came to a close in the form of his forthcoming 10-song set, My Love Is A Hurricane, recorded with producer Jason Burt (Leon Bridges, Sarah Jaffe, Paul Cauthen) at Modern Electric Studios in Dallas, TX. For the first time in his career, he did no pre-production ahead of time, working from gut feelings throughout the process and spending most of his time in the studio on the edge of his seat. The resulting R&B-influenced production layers Ramirez's widely acclaimed vocals atop "misty psychedelic undertones and potent gospel arrangements" (NPR’s Station Breaks). This experimentation with new melodies and rhythms casts Ramirez’s deeply personal songwriting on a backdrop of dreamy, groove-driven landscapes that heal the heart and promote positivity while prompting listeners to want to sing (and dance) along.
My Love Is A Hurricane is Ramirez’s fifth full-length record and eighth collection of songs. Early albums like American Soil (2009) and Apologies (2012) put him on the map both locally and beyond, while his STRANGETOWN (2011) and The Rooster (2013) EPs delivered fan-favorite recordings, “Shoeboxes” and “The Bad Days respectively, that are staple singalongs at his concerts to this day. He made his Thirty Tigers debut with 2015’s FABLES, produced by Noah Gundersen, which features his most widely received single to date, “Harder to Lie.” While this earlier work landed Ramirez firmly in the singer/songwriter canon, a need to do more exploring sonically led to the expansive sound of his most recent album, We’re Not Going Anywhere (2017). Influenced by ‘80s bands like The Cars and Journey, it is lyrically reflective of the country’s intense political landscape framed from his perspective as a bi-racial American of Mexican heritage.
As singer/songwriters evolve as people, so does their art, and that is apparent on Ramirez’s newest offering. The soundscapes utilized on My Love Is A Hurricane are unlike those of any recording he has previously crafted, but at the heart of his critically acclaimed music remains the same “powerful voice and perceptive pen” (Austin Chronicle). The essence of these new songs rests in songwriting that has gained such praise from NPR Music as, “It's not easy for a writer to maintain the aura of the unspoken in a song...David Ramirez does so beautifully;” and “quietly mesmerizing” (WSJ) vocals that have been described by Stereogum as “a voice like a tall tale, one minute strong and thick, the next threadbare and careworn,” with The New York Times adding, “Mr. Ramirez is a resolutely hesitant singer, never pushing his hurt, letting it instead decay him from within.”
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