"can't bear to see your sweet face drop like a tear"
Like most lives, Ethan Gold's path has been diverted by fallen trees, silver opportunities and bruised and battered by the randomness of the cosmos. He was raised in San Francisco after the seasons of free love had passed. His father is the Beat-adjunct writer Herbert Gold, and his mother, Melissa, was killed in a helicopter crash with legendary rock promoter Bill Graham. Gold always remembers escaping into the creative rabbit hole that is music. Thus far, he has lived a life that has been full of high highs and really low lows, all the while, his art has been his saving grace.
When you absorb bits of his musical journey, and I urge you to read the full press notes below, you can understand what physical / spiritual punches and hugs have lead him to write the very moving Our Love Is Beautiful. I am a self admitted cynic and my jaded perspective is informed by all the evil that men do. The litany of greed, corruption, psychosis that permeates our country and countries, globally is stunning and hard to fathom. Still, I know that most people are good and will fight the good fight if shown how to tap into their own empathy and love. All the pain and distrust I have for movements, culture shifts, political and even artistic agenda might have built an armor around me, like a lot of us. It is easy to let this happen. Art can inspire, though, and I found Gold's track somehow seeping through the chinks in my battled worn armor. About Our Love Is Beautiful he shares:
"During this time of global crises in the form of Covid-19, climate crisis, racial injustice, police brutality, and more, what I felt more than ever was to spread this message of Love. People are longing for unity, inside and outside ourselves and with others. I think it’s resonated because it’s a song for that just cries out for tenderness that’s in all of us, just under the hard surface so many of us carry around."
"Even though I had over 30 tracks for my new record, "Earth City", which is out in October of 2020, I felt this song as much as any of the new songs, is a message that absolutely needs to be heard, felt, and shared with others."
Gold's Our Love Is Beautiful flows (at first) on Beatle-esque vibes via sort of 'Fool On The Hill' flute sounds but quickly shifts into a more kind of 90's indie rock College Radio feel, maybe because of Gold's vocal aesthetic that has a tender, yet sort of broken post punk scratch. His croon has punch, feels visceral in it's sadness, as the bass and drums add an emotional gravitas to the lovely syncopated guitars and moving words:
"come here I want to tell you something good, something nice before we wreak again"
"can't bear to see your sweet face drop like a tear, cause I need you here, you know you're my only friend... our love is beautiful, our love is beautiful, beautiful"
Those first two lines, for some reason feels like a gut punch and made me want to cry. Stylistically, Gold's vox and melodies feel to me like a crash of Pete Ham (Badfinger) and Rivers Cuomo (Weezer) and they wrap deeply around you like a funeral hug. I think they also hit hard because of the uncertain times we are living in, the identity politics that have us at odds with each other, because the world feels so fucking heavy right now and because of the special one I am traversing this uneven terrain with. We all have our own miss-steps that can also shake us to our core but, in the end, we cannot let them cripple us to the point of paralysis. Maybe we can all make things better, collectively in the microcosm and macrocosm. I hope tomorrow I will feel the same sort of hope and cosmic energy in the air (even just a little bit) and if not, I can, at least, play this song again.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
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ethangold
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Ethan is currently finalizing the double-album Earth City, a record about urban alienation and love, as well as about the destruction of the planet. (Scheduled for release in mid 2020.) He is starting to release singles in the autumn of 2019, beginning with the environmental anthem "Never Met a World Like You."
His third full album in 2018 was his soundtrack of original songs and score to the indie film, The Song of Sway Lake, featuring John Grant and the Staves singing Ethan's songs.
While working on this film score in New York, Ethan fell in a freak accident. Temporarily losing the ability to speak and to do complex tasks, during his convalescence he clarified his vision further. While playing with San Francisco literary rock weirdos The Size Queens, he found himself returning to early influences, being re-inspired by the futuristic sounds that were his refuge in the post-post-hippie milieu of his childhood, with skinheads roaming the confused streets of San Francisco before the tech boom. Last year Ethan released his collection of live covers of New Order, Bauhaus, Of Montreal, Devo, The Knife, and other influences, as Live Undead Bedroom Closet Covers (“Unhinged but weirdly compelling” – Uncut; “Often brilliant cover versions” – Shindig!; “Rather fantastic” – The Crack). In the summer of 2018 he followed this with the naive-electronic album Expanses (Teenage Synthstrumentals) (“Wildly diverting” – Electronic Sound; “Primitive analogue instruments to their sound-warping limits” – Uncut; “Records like these are my reason for getting into independent music in the first place” – Skope Mag; “My nominee for record of the year” – Vents Magazine.)
Gold first stepped into public consciousness when he produced and arranged Elvis Perkins’ blog-hyped debut Ash Wednesday. After moonlighting as bass player in his brother Ari’s celebrity-driven folk party band the Honey Brothers, and scoring his twin’s debut, the epic comedy Adventures of Power, Ethan began honing his intensely personal style while living in a dilapidated flat in Los Angeles, eventually releasing his debut art-rock album Songs From A Toxic Apartment to underground acclaim (Pitchfork, etc). He then began rolling out a series of videos from the album showcasing his visceral approach, which led to side work as a video director.
Gold was raised in San Francisco, during the hangover that followed free love. His father is Beat-adjunct writer Herbert Gold, and his mother Melissa was killed in a helicopter crash with legendary rock promoter Bill Graham. For Ethan, the escape was always into his music.
ABOUT "OUR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL"
“Our Love is Beautiful” is a preview of the upcoming double album Earth City, an epic in a time when that’s not the norm, about human isolation and longing in the modern world. Longing for self-love, for human connection, and ultimately for union with the natural world. There’s a soul wound for so many people in our civilization which is usually expressed as a longing for romance. And that’s part of Earth City and “Our Love is Beautiful”. And, the song and the coming album are really about the much larger sense of love and longing, after all our colorful individual searches, for unity, inside and outside ourselves.
When I used to play really aggressive music, none of which I released, I wrote songs that were musically complicated but simple in their meaning: rage or self-hatred. I was in a lot of psychic pain for a long time, but paths out started whispering to me in musical dreams. “Our Love is Beautiful” is one of those songs that shows up simple, maybe like a flower is simple. For some people it’s a romantic love song, for some it’s a lullaby, for others it’s an anthem of pride. My old demos were uploaded and set to all kinds of visuals by people I don’t know. It’s been covered by nerdy kids in bedrooms around the world. I’ve been asked for the guitar fingerings by grooms and brides so they can sing it to their beloveds on their wedding nights. I think it’s resonated, even before I ever released it, because it’s a song for that tenderness just under the hard surface so many of us carry around.
My life has been a winding path, but maybe Earth City is showing up at the right time in 2020. It seems during this pandemic the entire world has taken a pause. Like everyone was running and pushing and struggling and gobbling up experiences and food and cultures and people, in a kind of blind frenzy, and now the noise has quieted down just a little. I hope the world takes this opportunity to shift towards love in the biggest sense of the word, and towards awareness of the majesty of our planet, and the incredible opportunity we have in being alive.
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